Saturday, April 18, 2009

Caution: Clothing can harm you.

So apparently this is not something new nor does there seem to be an easy solution. We noticed lately that Julian scratches and scratches at the back of his neck area. We thought that maybe he was just itchy or that maybe he had dry skin but the itching was pretty specific to the back of his neck. I remember reading an article way-back-when about chemical burns being caused by the "tagless" tag on infant clothing so I decided to dig around and see if maybe this is what was causing Julian's scratching. Sure enough, this is it!

Gotta love the blogosphere and being able to find all this information. I found this one blog, Mom's Journal, and her daughter's rash looked exactly as Julian's did. He was wearing Gerber onesies almost exclusively as his base layer and this is what this little girl used to wear too. We stopped wearing them 2 days ago and his back is almost totally healed and he hasn't scratched all day.

It's not only Gerber, but also Carter's, Circo, and BabyGap. I just don't understand how the clothing companies can get away with this? I also hate that I'm not entirely sure what my options are to find safe clothing for Julian as clothes with tags (hard to find as 'tagless' is becoming the industry standard with infant/children's clothing) make him itch, too.

Here is the original article I read a few months ago about this issue. If anyone has comments or recommendations on how to get around this, please let me know! I hate the idea of having to tape all his clothing but if that's what has to happen, well, so be it as long as my little guy stops itching!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much for the link to my blog. Your little guy is such a cutie!

I'm not sure if Hanes makes t-shits in his size but that's what we've been using for Sophia. They're tag-less, but they don't use the puffy or iron on type stencils like Carter's and Gerber. It works for our daughter anyway.