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Initial results of our Pampers Dry Max skin testing: Things are getting interesting
By Jeremiah | June 08, 2010 | 36 comments / Comment now
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 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?
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?)
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.
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."
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.
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.
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Good work! I can’t believe you wore poop on your arms in the name of science!
Also, Z sounds a-dorable. The picture of her covering her face reminded me of my daugher (3 years) who, upon smelling her little brother’s BM diapers, always says, “Yuck, I smell poopy in my mouth.” LOL - kids, they’re the greateast!
D
WOW. I’ve never in my life been so excited to hear that someone has a rash!
Blogger biceps. Classic!
Your results are surprising, but very interesting.
You guys are intrepid! Wow. Interested to see where this leads you.
Hmm, sounds like my thoughts on this whole issue may be somewhat in line with reality. I’ve wondered about the quality control during a certain period of time. I’m still wondering if a certain batch (or batches) were exposed to sunlight or heat. Pampers’ official word is to not store the diapers at temperatures over 85 fahrenheit. Perhaps you can work that into your next test?
Thanks for this....interesting stuff....looking forward to the results! Did you know that one of your amazon ads on the side is advertising Pampers Dry Max?
[Yep. We don’t have the ability to micromanage those. Ads for products tend to appear alongside posts/pages that feature those products, whether or not we are recommending them or criticizing them. Obviously we’d love for our advertising to be more effective, but we only have so much time to spend optimizing and fiddling with our ads. - Ed.]
I knew it! I didn’t dream what happened to my baby! Thank you so much you guys! Thank you SO MUCH for doing this!
If anything you just proved Pampers is telling the truth. You can’t link this to the diaper any more then we could link this to that child’s potent poop.
First we have Mommy bloggers giving us science classes (andtwinsmake5.com) and now we have them conducting experiments? Let’s leave this to the experts. I can’t believe people paid for this “poop”.
Are you going to tell me you pureed this poop and tested it to make sure it was consistent in chemistry and composition in each sampling? Are you going to use other poop next time? And what about this person who supplied the diapers, we verified she didn’t tamper with them?
Sorry folks, I’m not buying into this Scooby and the gang approach to this social media inspired “mystery”. What’s next for you, a trip to a haunted house or maybe Roswell?
[And they would have gotten away with it, too… if it weren’t for those meddling bloggers! But seriously: We will take your composition question into consideration for our follow-up test. As for tampering, who’s the “mystery"-lover now? All of our results will offer full procedural details (unilke those conducted by companies themselves) and consumers can judge for themselves how much stock to put in them. That’s the beauty of transparency - unlike the “experts,” we let you draw your own conclusions. - Ed.]
Awesome! I’ve been dying to hear the results - its weird how excited I am about your next round of testing. And regarding the BM on your arms for 8 hours… Better you than me! Hahaha
As always, excellent.
i think an even better indicator would be not just urine or bm but both combined as most children pee a little when they poop. The ammonia in the pee can intensify the poopy reaction...just a thought.
That is funny about the amazon ad. Good work! I can’t wait to here more.
Wow you guys are awesome!
I only bought one package of Pampers and that was one package to much! When my now three year old son was just a few weeks old I bought some newborn Pampers and they gave my son the most horrible red bum rush ever that lasted for weeks. I have change to Huggies diapers right away and since then he never had very bad rushes like that.
I am not sure if three years ago they had Dry-Max but we did had really bad reactions to those diapers :(
Hmmm...similar to Noneya, I wondered if there was a QC/formula change issue. I also wondered if this wasn’t a case along the lines of the original 1980’s Batman movie - you know, where people are poisoned if they mix deoderent, talcum powder, and lipstick. Is it something that may be specific to one grouping of people based on food consumed, body chemistry, etc. (Note - if it is, their R&D;needs to get on the stick because that really isn’t acceptable!)?
We switched over to cloth. One Grandma is on board. The other, well...she’s been receiving your articles on the topic as well as others and is slowly warming.
I do wonder though, if you get a rash from the Dry Max after 8+ hours if Pampers will say “Well, diapers were meant to be changed frequently, and that doesn’t represent reality. If your baby has a rash it’s your own fault for not changing as often as you should.” Wait, that IS what they said. I think waiting too long with the patch test is just giving them ammunition.
[That’s why our test is designed to comparative, not assess absolute levels or their objective significance. We are interested in learning whether a given diaper triggers MORE or WORSE rash activity. It is standard procedure in skin testing to exacerbate conditions to elicit responses; we’re doing that but not attempting to correlate specific conditions with real-world effects. We’re just comparing the effects of two different diapers. - Ed.]
What a story! And I’m particularly impressed that you plan on doing a second trial to learn more. I wouldn’t have volunteered to apply baby poop to my arms even once.
But I have to ask, given the results, whether there is any chance that the anonymous donor of the Dry Max could have tampered with it somehow before sending it to you. Was it sealed in some kind of original packaging when you received it?
[No, we cannot prove that the diapers were not tampered with. We also cannot prove that rash photographs are real, or that we were actually speaking to Jodi Allen the other day rather than an imposter. Welcome to the court of public opinion, where people tend to be reasonable if given the opportunity to examine real evidence and its potential limitations. - Ed.]
Remember that, due to normal perspiration, after several days the “dry” diaper swatches will not have been perfectly dry.
I’m so glad that you’ll be testing the waistband and the leg elastics. Those are the areas that were problematic for my daughter (which prompted our move to cloth). She got a rash on her tummy and along her thigh that did not respond to various cremes and ointments prescribed by the doctor. After a day in cloth and wool, voila! It was gone and has never returned.
Thanks so much for all of your hard work. You are definitely dedicated!
Forgive me if this is an oversight, but did you put the samples on and then leave them on for a full 8.5 hours without changing?
If that’s the case, then it’s really not surprising you got rashes… anyone would get a rash sitting in BM for that length of time…
[See our response to another commenter above. Feedback always welcome, but please understand we’re comparing effects, and our basic procedures are consistent with many of those used in industry. - Ed.]
@Stephanie - that was part of our issue with rashes (he never had diaper rash, but a consistent diaper “line” of rash at the legs and waistband). Never went away, and was independent of any particular brand (we tried various Pampers, Huggies, Costco’s Kirkland, Earth’s Best, Luvs, Target...) that we used in an attempt to mitigate the issue.
One week in gDiapers pants (handmedowns from one of my sisters) with cotton cloth inserts? And...waist and legband rash gone. None has reappeared in the near month since.
WOW is all I can say for anyone who will wear BM, especially that of someone else’s. You are a stronger person than I.
I switched my daughter over to the Dry Max diapers as soon as they came out, and we have had no problems. Perhaps the children’s skin sensitivity should also be considered here. When I was a child 30 years ago, I was allergic to disposable diapers and my mom was forced to use cloth… no lawsuits or complaints ensued because of my sensitive skin. Diaper manufacturers cannot be held liable for creating a diaper perfect for all skin types.
I also have to agree with those who stated 8 hours in a dirty diaper is excessive, and good parenting has to play a role at some point.
Good luck with round 2!
[See above. These test procedures are not intended to be real-world conditions. They are designed to compare multiple diapers for relative effects. Agree with you regarding skin sensitivity, except that parents with sensitive skin like to be told when they are changing products, rather than having it changed without their knowledge. It helps them respond appropriately and with a minimum of harm to their child when they do have a problem. - Ed.]
You guys are the shizzle!!!
Katie, and her bottom, thank you for the work you’re doing. Her skin is super, super sensitive. As in, she gets a rash from cotton blends—that sensitive. I’m very nervous about using DryMax; my husband is willing to give it a chance.
So far, every time we’ve needed new diapers for her, we’ve found a box of the old kind on the shelves. That kind of luck cannot last forever, and I’m considering alternatives because I don’t want her to have a second of pain after everything else she’s gone through.
For those who are arguing about the eight hours in poop thing—I’m guessing they never had a baby who pooped in their sleep and didn’t wake up? I have had two of that model and I’m sure they spent a full eight hours in it sometimes. Don’t wake a sleeping baby. It’s a pretty darned firm rule in my house.
Maybe, just for the sake of the skeptics, use a cloth diaper as a control. I also agree with using urine and stool combined - I think most kids urinate while having a BM.
Good job. Can’t wait to see the results of the next test!
May I make a suggestion for your next test?
I think you need a second control, where there’s just plain water inside of the diaper. Water is a neutral on the pH scale, and there’s a chance that the stuff in the diaper getting wet will still cause some type of skin reaction. With water’s neutrality, the arguement of “Well, there must be something in the urine or BM that’s causing an extreme reaction, and it’s probably because urine/BM is slightly acidic.” (I’m going out on a limb to assume our body waste is acidic, and not basic)
If you get a reaction from the water, it makes a stronger case that the stuff inside the diapers react unfavorably with ANY type of liquid. Because, urine is liquid, and I assume the BM had a cream consistency, so it also had to have SOME liquid in it.
Poop itself is very acidic. Carrots, peas and oatmeal also make poop even more acidic. My daughter has had these rashes and we have used Pampers exclusively for 2 years. Some of the rashes were definitely due to the poop. she had a strong case diarrhea and she had a rash so bad, she was bleeding. I called the company to find out what was going on. She did have a bit of reaction to the diaper, but mostly b/c of the poop. After I use a wipe full of soap (aka chemicals), I then use some water and 2-3 small pieces of paper towel to “rinse” her off and remove the residue from the wipe, & dry her off completely and I still do this every diaper change. Then, at the time of the rashes, I put alcohol free-Witch Hazel (Thayers is the only brand I found) and let it dry. Then I make sure to put on diaper cream every time to make sure that if she does poop her skin is protected. I use Weleda Diaper Care & Avalon Organics Diaper Rash Cream, you can find these at http://www.iherb.com. Good luck and Wow! That was a lot of work for the testing! Thanks for putting yourself up to it!
Another industry standard is to make the tests blind (or double blind). Psychology can go a long ways here even if you dont intend it to. Maybe on the next test have someone else make up the diaper samples in such a way you cannot tell which brand is which, and only have that revealed after the test is complete.
Thank you for wearing poop on your arm so I didn’t have to!
Was the poop from a breastfed or formula-fed baby?
[Formula-fed. - Ed.]
Interesting....I’ll tell you this much. We were avid Pampers users for both kiddos until this Dry Max stuff came out. First time, my DS got the WORST diaper rash ever from one BM that wasn’t even bad, nor was it on his bum for more than ten minutes. It tooks two weeks to clear up after using REPEATED treatments including a prescription!...Oh, and the best part? It didn’t even BEGIN to start clearing up until I ran out of that box and switched to Huggies in a pinch. hmmmm...the plot thickens? Each time we’ve used these he’s had a reaction all over his bum, onto his legs. I decided never to buy them again on my own but this just confirms I’ve likely made the right choice for my babe and his bottom....jeesh!
Glad my baby was in cloth diapers!
I am not surprised that the Dry Max caused a rash. I used pampers on my first two kids, born in 2005 and 2008, without any problem. My third was born the first week of April this year, and once again we used pampers. Well, the poor girl had an angry rash for the first month of her life. It didn’t rise to the level of a chemical burn, but was still bothersome. I couldn’t figure out what was causing it until I read about the Dry Max issues, and on your rec, switched to Target brand diapers. The rash was literally gone within a day and has never returned. I can’t speak to the diapers that are on the shelves today, but the ones we bought in April were no good.
I am so glad you did this! To suggest that we are all just “mommy bloggers” is ridiculous. I am a very educated health professional. I know a rash when I see one! I CAN tell the difference between a diaper rash and a reaction. My son had the very same reaction that you did. His skin raised up with very defined red edges and the inside was white or red. The blotches were anywhere from 1 inch to 7 inches. They were not confined to the diaper area. He began to have them all over his body. I agree about the blind study and maybe recruit a friend or two. Nice job!!
I applaud the experiment, kudos for the willpower to see it through - and for the imagination in thinking of it in the first place. The attitude of ‘Let’s leave this to the experts’ expressed above has had SOOO many positive outcomes in the recent past—see any range of topics from media coverage of foreign policy; expert economic planning and regulation; or, for that matter, mineral exploration and production… Hat off for not believing blindly.
My only suggestion WRT to testing potentially different version of seemingly identical diapers from the period prior to product change is to note the date of production (if possible) through lot#. Also note that online outlets in some cases STILL sell pre-redesign packages - if not exact production date, perhaps chronological sequence can be established.
Last, take out Z’s full first name from the article (unless this was already common knowledge)
last year we switched to crusiers from swaddlers. two weeks into it, we had a DRY diaper, as in NO PEE, burst or rip on DS’s bottom. i changed it IMMEADIATLY, and wiped a ton of what looked like sand, or glitter, off of him. within an hour he had not a rash, but small bleeding holes in his skin. NO REDNESS surrounding, just bloody holes, like tiny craters. i freaked and went to the Dr’s and took pics, because it was so damn wierd. ive seen a bloody rash before- DD had a bad D. rash after some antibiotics as an infant 11 years ago. this was different in that it came up in an hour, was a perfect butterfly pattern- like a few of the grains of glitter stuff got stuck between the cheeks- and at its beginning was completely normal skin, just with holes in it. a rash developed within hours, with raised welts and redness.
stupid me figured it was one diaper, and continued to use them. the EXCAT same thing happened the next day- this time no more then 5 min after he had it on. again with the little grains of glitter/sand, and even more craters/worse rash.
What a great experiment! We were given a pack of Pampers Swaddlers when my daughter was born, and they caused this first-time-mom to switch to cloth! The Pampers were terrible!
First, they didn’t fit right and I was constantly trying to adjust them.
Second, my newborn daughter (whose diaper was changed before the first driblet of pee could even be absorbed) was developing a terrible rash. Then, after settling into a routine I realized that it wasn’t a normal baby thing...it was the diapers. And to top it all off they are manufactured by the devil (AKA Proctor and Gamble).
To all of those criticizing this experiment, I hope that you are not relying on P&G;’s test results of their products. Perhaps you should take a tour of their testing facilities in Cincinnati...maybe then you will appreciate test results based on HUMAN skin.
My baby girl had an awful rash from the dry max diapers (samples, never put any on her that I purchased). She had big bleeding bilsters. I have since switched to cloth diapering but use huggies nighttime diapers at night and huggies little movers when we go out of town for more than 2 days. I would never buy pampers diapers again or reccommend them to anyone!
Glad someone is researching this!