And it looks like the lawyers won.

The class-action lawsuit by 59 plaintiffs was launched to confront Procter & Gamble with evidence that the company's Dry Max diapers were causing unusually severe rashes. The new formulation, which reduced absorbent paper and redistributed the liquid-absorbing plastic in a design the company touted as better for the environment and less bulky, led to a Facebook group with thousands of members sharing photographs of severe rashes and blistering and led to an extensive ZRecs investigation, wall-to-wall mainstream media coverage, an inquiry by the Consumer Products Safety Commission, and a major change of course in marketing by Procter & Gamble.

Pampers will pay $2.7 million in lawyers' fees, and has committed to spending $400,000 on "training programs in pediatric skin health" while admitting no wrongdoing. They are also paying plaintiffs $1,000 each to cover their expenses.

Marketing under the cover of science is nothing new in the baby products industry. It's how Nestle and other infant formula companies market formula under questionable claims around the world, and it's how P&G is frightening parents in China to begin favoring diapers over their cultures' time-tested methods of potty training, and encouraging parents in India to switch from cloth to disposables:

There’s even bigger potential in India, where the birth rate is almost double that of China but the diaper market remains tiny at about $43.4 million. (Pampers is the top-selling brand there, too.) So now, P&G plans to take the sleep argument throughout rural and poor areas in India and elsewhere. The company also makes its case by positioning itself as a baby-care educator. Pampers sponsors healthcare-outreach programs such as a rural immunization program in China and mobile medical-care vans in Pakistan and Morocco. In India, there’s a door-to-door program that offers baby-care tips and diaper samples for moms. [Source]

This is an unfortunate outcome. P&G's educational programs have been and will remain committed to the idea that diaper rash is naturally occurring and has no relationship to the practices or materials used in modern diapering. In other words, they've committed to earmarking $400,000 of their marketing budget to sponsored programs that promote their financial interests under the cover of scientific objectivity.

If you declared yourself as a class member in this lawsuit, you actually have two options if you do not like this arrangement. You can object to the settlement in writing, and have the court "consider your views." If you live in the Cincinnati area, or are willing to travel to make your voice heard, you can ask the Court to let you speak at the approval hearing. Here are the details from the settlement notice [PDF], including deadlines for each option.

If you are a Class Member, you can object to the settlement and give reasons why you think the Court should not approve it. The Court will consider your views. To object, you must send a letter saying that you object to the settlement in In Re Dry Max Pampers Litigation, Case No. 1:10-cv-00301. Be sure to include your name, address, telephone number, signature and the reasons why you object to the settlement. You must send your objection by first class mail to the Dry Max Pampers Notice Administrator, the Court, and to one of the attorneys for the Settlement Class ("Class Counsel") and one of the attorneys for Procter & Gamble. A list of the attorneys is provided on the Full Notice, available at www.diaperclassactionsettlement.com. Your objection must be postmarked no later than August 29, 2011, or your objection will not be valid and will not be considered by the Court.

You may ask the Court to speak at the hearing on the approval of the settlement. To do so, you must send a letter saying that it is your "Notice of Intention to Appear" in In Re Dry Max Pampers Litigation, Case No. 1:10-cv-00301. Include your name, address, telephone number and signature. Your Notice of Intention to Appear must be postmarked no later than September 21, 2011, and also must be sent to the Clerk of Court, Class Counsel and Procter & Gamble's Counsel at their addresses in the Full Notice. You cannot speak at the hearing if your Notice of Intention to Appear is late.

I was interviewed by the fine gentlemen at DadLabs a few weeks ago on the current state of regulation and ongoing exposure to BPA. (Don't follow these guys yet? Follow them.) They posted the interview segment last week, and did a great job of trimming my thirty minutes of commentary into a succinct web interview. I wanted to share the interview, and then offer you notes I used to prepare for it, which has quite a bit more detail.



I'm going to post a couple of tip lists as separate posts, because they're pretty utilitarian and I want them to be easily referenced and shared. But here's the meat of our understanding of the issue of BPA regulation as it currently stands. These are raw notes, as I prepared them to consult during the interview.

The state of BPA regulation and prospects for chemical reform

The risk
Endocrine disruptor, mimics body’s own hormones. Greatest effects in early childhood development and in utero. NIH, FDA, and many many studies have all expressed concern over risks. Longitudinal studies of behavior are needed (and under way). Replicability of results is key. Known hazards add up.

BPA reform: There are reasons for optimism.
Eight states now have BPA bans (mostly on bottles and sippy cups): Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin. Additionally, 17 states are considering new bans this year on a variety of items.

These bans have nationwide impact because distribution channels are national, not state-based.

One common argument against banning BPA in the U.S. used to be that BPA was OK with the European Union, which typically has stricter chemical regulations. As of this month, BPA is now banned in baby bottles in the EU -- the ban just went into effect (manufacturing ban).

At the societal level, most companies have switched to polypropylene or a new material, Tritan copolyester, for bottles. There never were many polycarbonate sippy cups. But manufacturers have made changes only in those product areas that have become regulated -- there is no generalized movement occuring in bath toys, pacifiers, or teething toys. Which brings us to...

Broader chemical reform: It's hard to be optimistic.
The Toxic Substances Control Act dates to 1976. Mindset was that chemicals should be treated as "innocent until proven guilty." It needs reform. Reform means meeting a standard of safety prior to use. Under the TSCA, the EPA’s hands are tied. The 62,000 chemicals on the market when it was signed into law were more or less grandfathered in, and only 2,000 have undergone any required testing. EPA must prove that chemical poses "unreasonable risk" to require testing at all.

There is a reform bill now in the Senate, the Safe Chemicals Act, but the chemical lobby is very, very strong. The same basic bill failed to pass in 2010, 2009, and 2008, the year the chances probably seemed strongest. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey has been behind every one of the bills.

Coke shareholders just [April] rejected a shareholder proposal asking the company to disclose its plans for removing BPA from its cans. It was defeated roughly 3:1, just as a similar proposal was a year ago. Since their own totally non-commital commitment to thinking about looking at alternatives to BPA-lined cans is getting pretty long in the tooth, the secrecy looks worse with each passing year.

One bright spot is that the American Academy of Pediatrics is now calling for reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act.

-----

Stay tuned for two lists of tips (titles will get better):

• What you should do, beyond buying "BPA-free" labeled products, to limit your family's BPA consumption


• Seven things you should care about avoiding if you care about avoiding BPA

There's a lot of out-with-the-old-thinking going on at ZRecs HQ these days, and it just so happens to fall right around spring this year. We're happy to be finishing up a couple of small remodeling projects and are turning to decluttering and a deep spring cleaning we'd love to get to more than once a year, but often don't.

In the spirit of spring cleaning, we're proud to announce that NewLeaf, a line of cleaning products invented by a longtime ZRecs reader, has offered to be a direct sponsor of Z Recommends for the next month.

ZRecs fan and mom Sarapage Bauguss wanted to protect her children from harmful ingredients in many of the products she'd been cleaning her home with, and the more she learned about what was in her name-brand household cleaning products, the more frustrated she became, identifying ingredients that were linked to allergies, asthma, respiratory difficulties, birth defects, miscarriages, and several cancers. It was her zeal to find cleaners made of simple, natural ingredients she knew she could trust that led her to launch NewLeaf, a fully transparent natural cleaning products startup that offers cleaners with simple, pure, easy to pronounce, and frequently organic ingredients that are fully disclosed on all ingredients lists -- no "fragrance" hiding PEGs or pthalates here.

NewLeaf is committed to producing natural cleaning products that perform as well if not better than leading brands, and all products have been tested by the independent labs at the Toxics Use Reduction Institute at the University of Massachusetts to evaluate their effectiveness. The current NewLeaf lineup includes All-Purpose Cleaner, Glass Cleaner, Granite Cleaner, Bathroom Cleaner, and Organic Dish and Hand Soap. Cleaners retail for $5.99 a bottle.

NewLeaf Cleaning Set Giveaway

In honor of Spring Cleaning, we have a set of four NewLeaf cleaners for one ZRecs reader: a bottle each of NewLeaf's All Purpose Cleaner, Glass Cleaner, Bathroom Cleaner, and Organic Dish & Hand Soap. To enter, answer this question: According to the Environmental Protection Agency, how many times more likely are toxic chemicals in household cleaners to cause cancer than air pollution? (Hint: Check NewLeaf's "Facts" page.)

Email your answer to editors (at) zrecs (dot) com with "NewLeaf" in the subject line, plus your answer to the trivia question and your U.S. mailing address in the body. We'll accept entries until Wednesday, March 9 at 1:00 p.m. CT and select a winner from all correct entries, and the winner will get a free $24 set of non-toxic household cleaners shipped to their home.

We've completed our writeup of our Pampers Dry Max skin irritant testing and published a final report you can read online, download, print out, or share with others. We'll summarize a bit here, but the full ten-page report is useful for anyone who has cared about this issue, for anyone who cares about others who have been affected by it, and for anyone who thinks this whole issue is a media or corporate conspiracy. Read our study for yourself and see what you think.

• Measurement of Relative Skin Irritation of Pampers Dry Max Disposable Diapers

From the report:

We believe the most significant finding of our study is its demonstration that, when compared with a leading competitor or its own previous formulation, Pampers with Dry Max are more likely to cause extended irritation persisting long after the diaper is changed. Examining the behavior of this rash when the skin is repeatedly re-covered with another diaper which is then soiled or wetted on top of the persistent rash, was beyond the scope of this study; but it does not feel excessively speculative to posit that a rash so treated would be more likely to deteriorate further than skin that showed no signs of being compromised.

A more troubling finding, and a highly illuminating one, is that beyond this overall difference in performance, Dry Max Pampers from two different "batches" were associated with different levels of both initial and extended irritation. These differences were documented both by a blinded "scent test" and by their tracking codes. The batch linked to all cases of extended irritation, and which triggered the sole reaction to a urine-containing diaper in this study, was the batch that had been acquired from a consumer whose own child had suffered from severe diaper rash while wearing diapers from the same package.

Of all the people with whom we will ultimately come knocking to share our findings directly, we are most interested in sharing it with Procter & Gamble. We're interested in an ongoing dialogue with them and will be offering them the chance to follow up on our findings with some specific information that might shed further light on our testing and on their Dry Max diapers.

Read the study here, judge our methods and our analysis for yourself, and pass it on.

Thanks to all of those who sent or offered to send diapers for us to test, for those who read and commented on our draft versions of this study, and most of all to the readers who contributed financially to make this study happen.

Note: We're leaving comments off on this post because this report involved not only a lot of work but some personal sacrifice, and we'd like it to allow it to stand alone on our pages for consumers to access and come to their own conclusions about. That said, if you feel this report is meaningful or scurrilous, we encourage you to discuss, excerpt, reprint, distribute, analyze, and praise or pan on your own blog, with the lovers and haters on Babycenter, or anywhere else you see fit. If you talk about it on a blog, rest assured that we do read what other bloggers say about what we do, and we're sure your readers would enjoy the discussion as well. We are also always accessible to anyone upfront about their identity, and can be reached at editors (at) zrecs (dot) com with your questions, comments, and criticisms.

Don't know what this is about? Here's more ZRecs reporting on Pampers Dry Max than you can shake a stick at.

The Environmental Law Foundation has made waves recently with their announcement that they have discovered "unsafe levels" of lead in kids' juice drinks and related snack foods - apple juice, grape juice, packaged pears and peaches (including baby food) and fruit cocktail - and has put companies on notice for having more than .5 micrograms of lead in a serving of their products, under California's Proposition 65 regulations. They are restricted from saying how much more, but were kind enough to also offer a list [PDF] of products that did and did not contain such lead levels.

We're here to call B.S. on this study. Care to join us?

Yes, there is probably lead in your child's box of juice. There is also lead in your honey, your salad dressing, your teething biscuits, your store-bought chocolate chip cookies, your pickles, your lettuce, your spinach, and your sweet potatoes (fresh). There is lead in many of the things you - and your children - eat on a regular basis. That's because there is lead in pesticides, in the air, in the soil... almost everywhere.

What they really should be announcing is that they believe they have a new way to force kids' snack food companies to deal exclusively with farmers who are better stewards of the earth, and that way is Prop 65 + freaked-out parents. Companies get hit with a flash mob of bad publicity (although it will dissipate quickly - trust us) and hopefully this helps get some of them on board with finding ways to lower the levels. Everybody wins, right? Well, everybody but the parents you freaked out to help spread your "alarming" message.

Depending on how long you've been a parent, and on how long you've had your life enriched by the ever-helpful community of news-and-tips parenting hubs, you may or may not remember the FDA's announcement a couple of years ago that women's and children's vitamins had been found to have trace levels of lead. We wrote about it, and we have regretted it since - the claims of relevance to this information were so outdone by the confusion and stress they caused families, and for what? That one still has us scratching our head, but then, we don't claim to understand the politics of the Food and Drug Administration.

Before and since that "alarming" report came out, we have avoided many, many scary stories that have hit the news because we could not validate or defend their claims. It's probably why at least some of our readers are willing to listen to us, and at such great lengths, when we really do think there is something rotten in Denmark - and there is something really rotten pretty much all the time that deserves your attention. But this isn't it.

As with many environmental exposures, we agree with the ELF and others that it's the cumulative load that matters, and yes, with several sources of lead in their diet, children may exceed the FDA recommended safe limit for children under six (six micrograms a day). To that end, you could make the case that selecting a juice box brand that registered as "safe" according to ELF is better than one that exceeded the threshold. But the organization has provided no evidence that these lead levels in any particular brand are stable over any period of time - they tested 398 samples of 146 different branded products, but what would they find if they did the same testing six months from now? Ingredient suppliers can change rapidly in the food business. In some it is a true commodities market, with the mix of suppliers changing on a daily basis. What basis do you have for believing that a brand that had no sample hit the 0.5 microgram threshold in these tests would meet that standard two months from now?

Don't get us wrong: There is nothing good about lead in food, and focusing on food children consume is relevant - the daily legal levels of lead intake are lower for kids. (While the ELF assures us that "scientists agree" that there is "no safe level of lead," the FDA, the rest of the world's regulatory bodies, and the WHO take a more practical approach.) But these problematic food types - which the Environmental Law Foundation selected based on government data that has been out there for years - are the tip of the iceberg as far as lead contamination of our food supply are concerned. I bet there's someone else who can do the heavy lifting on this one - but here's a little shorthand:

This document from the FDA [PDF] shows levels of lead found in food products over a period of several years. The median amount found seems like the most reasonable figure to use.

A 125 ml box of apple juice works out to about 130.5 grams, assuming a specific gravity of 1.043739 g/ml. 130.5 grams goes into 1 kg about 7.6 times. So when the FDA say that the average chocolate bar was found to contain .021 mg of lead per kilogram of product, they are also saying that it contains 21 micrograms of lead in that kilogram, and that that works out to about 2.7 mcg in 130 grams of chocolate. 130 grams is the weight of about three standard-sized Hershey's chocolate bars, which means that a single chocolate bar (one adult serving) tested by the FDA themselves also fails to meet the levels we're discussing here for kids' snacks. Give a child half of that same chocolate bar, and it barely passes.

But I wouldn't give my child half a chocolate bar, you might be saying. It has too much sugar, and too much caffeine. Which is our point exactly: Unless someone comes forward with real data on levels in these products that far exceed the Prop 65 per-serving restrictions, you should be more concerned about the sugar in your juice boxes than you should about the lead. If this is your chance to ditch the juice boxes for actual fruit (which has fiber to balance out the sugars), or at least cut the kid back to one a day, all power to you. But don't let the Environmental Law Foundation use you as a pawn in their regulatory game.

I can't stop staring at my right forearm. To be more precise, I can't stop staring at a very faint patch on my forearm, smaller than a silver dollar and way less defined. I have squinted at it, looked away and back again, wondering if that patch of faint pink irritation is really there. I wonder, because its implications could be big.

Sunday was D-Day for our Pampers Dry Max skin reaction test here at ZRecs HQ, and let me tell you, it was an interesting day. Twenty-four hours later, we've been making plans for a second round of testing to attempt to cast greater light on a highly suggestive finding from our eight hours of patch testing. But to explain the results of our testing so far - and why we find them so intriguing - you'll need some details about what we did.

Consumers voted with nearly $300 in donations to ZRecs to help us fund a comparative test of Pampers Dry Max diapers and their pre-redesign predecessors. Three hundred bucks may not seem like a lot, but in an age in which everything offered on the Internet is expected to be free, the fact that our readers - old and new - banded together to meet our project goal and fund our independent research into Dry Max diaper safety speaks volumes to us. It also doesn't surprise us, though - 100+ ZRecs readers searched for Target onesies and sent 14 in to the Center for Environmental Health last year (at their own expense) to provide actionable evidence of the excessive lead content of a "Green baby" Target onesie. (They have yet to be recalled, but Target issued a stop sale and pulled them from the shelves at the request of the Attorney General of the state of California.) Collective consumer action can be a powerful thing.

The idea

The basic idea behind our Dry Max testing is easy to sum up.

Testing a product's potential to irritate the skin is a matter for experts, which we are not. Adult skin differs from infant skin; extreme conditions are used to test materials, and findings must be interpreted using a lot of expertise and erudition.

But there is one thing we believe even amateurs should be able to prove, and that is whether, in a direct comparison between Pampers Dry Max and Pampers previous diapers, one of them will cause a stronger reaction, or a reaction in a shorter span of time, than the other. This single fact could make the difference between a parent's willingness to trust Dry Max diapers with their child, regardless of how the diapers compare with their competitors, and offers the opportunity to answer the question of whether or not the change in formulation may have had an overall negative impact in a quantifiable and concrete way.

Long story short, diaper dissections can only take you so far.

Sounds simple, doesn't it?

Preparations

We purchased packages of Pampers Cruisers with Dry Max and Huggies Snug & Dry diapers from our local Target. We arranged with one of several readers who had a stockpile of pre-Dry Max diapers to send us a package through UPS. We purchased two three-ounce bottles of Spectrum Labs "Quick Fix" synthetic urine at $35 apiece, and paid extra for fast shipping, all so I could avoid putting real urine, presumably my own, against my skin and wearing it around for a day. We worked on our patch design, cutting up diapers and trying out different sizes and shapes to see how they'd fit on my arms and, in our initial plan, my chest and back.

Then two things happened that slowed us down a bit.

First, another reader contacted us - this one a parent offering a package of Dry Max diapers. We had already bought some at the store, but what she was offering to send was a pack of diapers that was actually known to have caused a serious skin reaction in a child. We realized that if Dry Max diapers had been changed at all since their initial "stealth" rollout eighteen months ago, even slight adjustments refining the production process could have unintended consequences. What if parents' inconsistent results with Dry Max diapers wasn't, or wasn't only, based on variations in individual infants' sensitivity? What if some Dry Max diapers caused more rashes than others?

We asked the reader to send them in, despite the fact that this meant a week's delay in our testing. I work outside the home, and wearing dirty diapers to work is not an option. So we shifted our testing date from Memorial Day weekend to Sunday, June 6.

The other unexpected event which dramatically affected our testing protocol was the call back from Pampers that we'd been waiting weeks for. We interviewed Jodi Allen and grilled Lisa Sanchez, P&G Baby Care's director of R&D. Sanchez gave us a few pointers on creating patch samples and explained P&G's product testing regimen, but the most important thing she said was something we did not want to hear. According to Lisa Sanchez, we were unlikely to get any skin irritation without the use of BM, i.e. poop, in the diaper patches. We weren't sure she was right, but after much discussion we decided that we had better go the full Monty on this testing, or we'd always wonder.

We arranged with a local friend who has a five- month-old baby to save Sunday's first dirty diaper for us to collect. Since the supplier had direct experience with Dry Max rashes, her mother was very understanding of our project, and gamely supplied me with a Ziplocked package when I showed up at her house late Sunday morning. (This made the purchase of synthetic urine feel a bit spendy, but can you blame me? Really?)

The test

By 1 p.m., I had four roughly inch-wide horizontal strips of Pampers Cruisers wrapped around each forearm - two on each saturated with synthetic urine, and two more on each arm with smears of baby BM, which is way, way more fragrant than I remembered. On my upper arms, fashionably encircling my blogger biceps, were two dry diaper patches. The twelve samples represented the three conditions - dry, urine-soaked, and BM-containing - for four diaper types - pre-Dry Max Pampers, Dry Max purchased from a store, Dry Max sent by a consumer whose child had reacted to them, and Huggies.

The wide strips cut from the diapers were designed to absorb and hold liquid without their shape getting too distorted as I moved, and to reduce the amount of medical tape that came into contact with my skin; we settled on using my arms only to ensure we weren't introducing an additional variable (skin condition) into the study. We used stickers to mark patch groups, an especially important consideration for our two sources of Dry Max diapers.

Our five-year-old daughter Z helped label the patch samples.




I had tested the tape by itself and had no reaction to it. Now we were using it to close the two long sides of the diaper we'd cut to make our sample; tape held it banded to my arm without making much skin contact, but I used additional tape to seal the sides to my skin and minimize air circulation. Remember, we're doing comparative testing - we want to elicit as much of a reaction as we can, and compare them, rather than to independently measure levels of irritation caused by any individual product.

Z helped affix the synthetic urine-saturated patches and the dry patches to my skin. I would not let her help in any way with the BM - not that she wanted to.


I planned to wear the diapers on my arms until 9 p.m., for a solid eight hours of exposure. (Some comparable skin testing can go as long as a month, but I'm sure they use smaller patches.) After an hour had passed, I was starting to feel uncomfortable. My arms were itching, in part simply from the bands of medical tape running along the edges of each sample. Additionally, my arms had a reasonable objection to having the skin breathability drop to near zero.


By four hours in I was feeling cagey and irritable. I felt like I was wearing dirty casts on my arms but no one would let me scratch around in there with a stick. For some reason I had thought there would be no smell emanating from these diapers, but by a few hours in all I could smell was the diapers' baby powder scent mixed with BM, although I believe the smell for outsiders was faint.

By seven hours I was alternating between two mental states: mild agony and a Zenlike acquiesence to a life of diapered arms, my cartoonishly thick forearms like those of a tragically flawed DC superhero.

At about eight and a half hours (Jenni got tied up getting Zella to sleep, and I needed her to immediately photograph anything we found on my arms, so I had to wait) Jenni took one final set of photographs to document the arm position of each color-coded diaper sample, and I slowly peeled them off one by one.

Results

The skin under all four dry diaper samples showed no reaction, although these, which had been on my upper arms, were among the most maddening to wear. There was a slight rash under only one of the urine-soaked diapers; the other three all looked very clear. I gently washed my arms under water with mild soap and returned for more photographs.

There were rashes under all four of the BM diapers, mostly contained in the area where the BM had made direct contact with the skin. They were difficult to photograph well, especially since the testing concluded at night and we were shooting indoors. I have adjusted the brightness and contrast of these photos to show the areas the rashes occurred.




All four of these locations showed redness and irritation in a oval shape with varying levels of swelling. One had a very slight welty edge, which was raised slightly higher than the surrounding, basically irritation-free skin. In two others, the entirety of the BM oval had slightly raised skin. In one of the four, the irritation seemed to spread slightly from the BM area out into a slightly larger swath of skin. The difference was slight but noticeable, and made the spot stand out from the others. After diagramming the position of each of these reactions and describing them in writing, we used our camera to match up the positions of the different colored samples with the types of diapers that had manned each irritated position on my forearms.

I must stress that all four BM samples had irritation, and differences were not dramatic; Jenni and I were only able to identify slight variations and were hard-pressed to determine their significance. But close examination of these rashes, with all assessments made prior to matching them up with their originating diapers, revealed a surprising coincidence.

First, the only diaper patch that had caused irritation when soaked with urine and held against my skin for nine hours was the Dry Max diaper that had been sent in by a reader. The other Dry Max diaper showed no irritation, as did the Huggies diaper sample, as did the pre-Dry Max sample. Was it just chance that the consumer-provided Dry Max diaper performed differently than the one we had bought at the store?

We noticed too that the one rash that appeared to spread slightly from its point of BM origin was also the Dry Max sample sent in by a consumer. Again, the Dry Max diaper we had purchased ourselves did not appear to perform any better or worse than the Huggies diaper or the pre-Dry Max Pampers diaper. It was difficult to really assess whether we were seeing something significant; the slightly different rash pattern we saw could have just been a result of a slight variation in the way the BM was spread on the sample, although checking the sample yielded no such clues. Another coincidence?

We went to bed unsettled, unresolved but excited. It looked like we needed to design another test to suss out these results and see if they could be amplified. Longer test durations? Surely we could narrow down the samples? And would we (groan) have to deal with baby BM again?

The next morning, the rashes seemed to have disappeared. The previous day's testing was receding in my mind like an unpleasant dream, one I knew would be recurring in some form in the week ahead. But I was driving at lunch when I noticed something on my forearm.

It was faint, barely visible, so subtle that I wondered if I was imagining it. The slightest blush, combined with an increased roughness of the skin, seemed to persist in one spot, and just one; the rest of my arms had no sign whatsoever of any rashes from the day before. I could not stop looking at that spot all day, with puzzled self-doubt, like when you stare at a printed word and it decouples from its meaning and sounds and looks alien. The initial rashes had been hard enough to photograph; this thing was so faint it was unphotographable and, as I said, so faint as to make me doubt my senses.

As a test, I turned to my daughter, Z, at dinner on Monday. She knew about the project generally but had been privy to none of the details of which patches had been from which diapers, and hadn't been privy to any of our discussion of our findings; she had been asleep when we removed the patches, hadn't seen the photographs, and hadn't even discussed the testing with us. I held my two forearms side by side, their white underbellies turned to catch the light from the window at our table at the delicatessen. "Look at my arms," I said to her, without explanation, background, or any leading pointing or direction. "If you were going to pick out the spot on my two forearms that was more red than any other spot, what spot would you pick?"

She pointed to the spot I had been looking at all day.

"You see it too?" I asked.

She nodded. I explained to her that that was the spot where I'd put the poopy diaper that had been sent in by a reader of our blog.

Z beamed and hugged me. "You solved the problem!" she called out joyfully.

"No," I said, "I did not solve the problem. But we may be on to something."

Next steps

What we have seen so far needs to be seconded with another test, but we will not simply repeat the previous test. Instead, we are going to reduce the number of different diapers (which exactly we'll eliminate we haven't quite decided yet) and do them dry only, or dry and with water. We will use smaller patches so I can wear them throughout my regular activities, and I will wear them for several days. Fewer patches, greater adaptation to my regular schedule, longer periods, and timing so we can end testing during daylight hours and get the best photos possible of the results. We don't need any additional funding; we have plenty of diapers, and although we haven't tallied all our receipts and costs yet, I think we have a little funding to spare.

If there is a difference in skin irritation between the Dry Max diapers currently on shelves (or at least the package we bought locally) and the ones sent in by a reader, we should be able to amplify that difference by making some element of the overall condition more extreme. We're hopeful that dry diapers will cause irritation given enough time, and that we will be able to develop more pronounced results that can offer more dramatic comparisons that either lend further credence to what we've seen so far, or discredit these initial results.

We'll also do dry testing of the elastic leg cuffs and waistband of Dry Max diapers against my skin, and check out the pH of both pre- and post-Dry Max fluff pulp.

Whether we demonstrate that our initial findings are linked to a meaningful difference within batches of Dry Max diapers, or invalidates that theory by providing inconsistent or unreplicated results, remains to be seen.

Want to know what happens next? Consider subscribing via RSS or email subscription. In addition to regular delivery of Z Recommends posts in full (no partial feeds here!) to your inbox or RSS reader, our feed includes links to outside content we select for its interest and relevance that is never mentioned on our blog. Both services are offered free to readers.