Baby Care and Wipes
Newborn babies have the most sensitive and soft skin. Therefore the products used on them have to be chemical-free and gentle. This will prevent any rashes and irritation on their skin.
Wipes are the most important yet unnoticed baby products. These are also essentially diapering must-haves. Wipes go a long way in ensuring the environment around a baby is clean and safe.
Baby care can happen in the most unimaginable environment like the backseat of a car, in an aeroplane, on the train, in the mall or shopping centre, at your friend’s place, etc. The options and situations are endless, and each can pose a serious risk to the child if proper care is not taken w.r.t cleanliness. Wipes do exactly that. They disinfect the baby and the surroundings that come into contact with him, including your hands.
How to Choose Good Baby Wipes
The wipe you choose for your baby will depend a lot more on your preference and environment. The product’s quality and feel can vary from product to product, and you will need to try it out before you can decide which one works well for you and the baby. There is a difference in not just the wetness of the wipe but also its texture. We have listed a few factors depending on which you can choose the ones that meet your needs.
List of Factors
- Content: All wipes are safe, tested, and quality certified by dermatological testing and certifying bodies. They are designed and formulated keeping the baby’s sensitivity in mind and therefore are non-toxic. But they may cause an allergic reaction in the baby. It all depends on how sensitive the baby’s skin actually is. So choose one which is as natural as possible with little or no unnatural elements like chemical fragrance. Wipes are available with just water or extracts of natural elements like Aloe Vera, Vitamin E, etc. to nourish the skin as well.
- Cost: The price of wipes will depend on the product and brand. As this is a frequently used item, you will be using a lot of them throughout the day, and costs can build up fast. To keep the costs low and compare, you can calculate each wipe’s cost as a standard for comparison before making a decision.
- Feel: The wipes must ideally have a soft cottony feel to them. Due to extremely soft skin, the baby will feel the harshness on the skin more than you do.
- Environment: Wipes can be made of all-natural or semi-synthetic materials. If you’re overly concerned about the environment and recycling, you can select the fully biodegradable ones, reducing carbon emissions and not hurting the environment. Some are even made of natural fibers like bamboo fibers.
- Quality: The Wipe has to not just clean and disinfects the area of skin it is used on. It must also be thick enough to absorb all that it is supposed to. Cheap quality wipes are very thin and can tear easily, leaving them more fragile than useful.
- Others: Few other points like PH balance level, soap-free, paraben-free, hypoallergenic-free can also be considered while choosing the wipes.
Product Review
Since we have defined the parameters of selecting the wipes, let us go and check some of the ones available in the market.
Babyganics Baby Wipes
This product comes with plant-based ingredients like sunflower, cranberry, tomato, and raspberry seed oils. There is nothing artificial used in these wipes, and they are also free from paraben, alcohol, fragrances, and artificial dyes. As they do not have any fragrance whatsoever, many parents may not prefer them. Their price comes down to 0.05$ per wipe as they ship in 400 wipes package that retails for 19.99$.
Huggies Simple Clean Wipes
The one quality that sets this brand of wipes apart is their softness and strength. You do not want the wipes tearing apart and disintegrating when you are cleaning up some mess. That’s the actual test of any wipe, and the easier they are, the better we recommend them.
The Huggies brand of wipes also wetters most others which helps them clean a larger surface area and separate more easily. The reason this quality matter is because, more often than not, your one hand is going to be busy trying to handle the baby. So the easier the Wipe is to pull out, the lesser the struggle involved and the easier the mom’s process. Their price comes down to 0.04$ per wipe as they ship in 648 wipes package that retails for $27.34.
Water Wipes
These wipes come in the simplest and most basic natural ingredients. These ingredients are Water and Grapefruit seed extract. This can be described as the definition of pure wipes. They are really gentle on the skin and can be used even on the most sensitive of skins.
We all have to agree that any natural product that has been processed in some form without the addition of any chemicals has an even shorter life span. Similarly, the same theory holds good for these wipes and so make sure they are not sitting around for too long after you have opened the packet. It will also make sense not to purchase too many wipes in one go. Their price comes down to 0.06$ per wipe as they ship in 240 wipes package that retails for $14.10.
Bambino Mio Cloth Baby Wipes
There is nothing better and natural than using cloth wipes. They save you a lot of costs in the long run and also save the environment. Perfectly hygienic and safe for the baby as it is a process being followed for probably a thousand years. You can use them when necessary and wash them when dirty, just like normal clothes.
A major plus point for these wipes is that they are extremely soft and comfortable for the child. These are larger and have a good absorbing capability. Therefore you will typically need only one of these when in reality, you will need several of the other wipes discussed above. Their price comes down to 1.16$ per wipe as they ship in 10 wipes package that retails for $11.60. It may look a tad expensive at first, but it can be used many times before they need to be replaced.
Choosing the Best Wipe
Everything comes down to how you prefer to use them. It’s possible that you can use the cloth-based ones when you are home so that you can easily toss them to be cleaned while using any of the others when out of home for the convenience they offer in disposing of the wipes. Convenience and hygiene score over all other aspects. Though the price is also a deciding factor, we have seen that there is really not a huge difference. The cost difference is only marginal, and so we leave it to other factors to make the final choice.
