Cotton Gloves for Eczema - The good, the bad and the ugly!

Cotton gloves for eczema are usually the first thing that comes to mind when you're an exhausted parent struggling with the reality of your child's eczema on a daily basis.
If you were like me, you found the idea a whole lot better than the reality of using gloves to help manage eczema and here's why:

• Cotton gloves and eczema creams
  Cotton gloves definitely play a role, especially with hand eczema in helping to keep creams and medications on skin, giving it a chance to heal.However, they will only help keep medications on that particular part of the body and as eczema parents, we know that eczema is usually not that isolated. It's commonly on the arms, legs and torso areas causing irritation which is why a full body garment especially at night time is required so you can lather all the affected areas in creams and then cover to give them the best chance to work.
• Cotton gloves are difficult to use
  While gloves are easy enough for adults and older children to put on, getting all the right fingers into all the right parts of a glove is tricky for younger children to manage. We found it especially difficult at night time, when our son's scratching was the worst and when we were the most exhausted too. We just wanted something we could easily pop him into or easily put on that'd cover his hands during sleep times when he'd do the most damage. This is how the Bamboo Bubby Bag Sleeping Bag, our Bamboo Buddy Fold Over Mitten Pajamas became such invaluable items in our night time eczema management 'kit'. We also found Eczema Mitten Sleeves were the perfect anti-scratch defense during the day, making it easy for us or his daycare carers to flip the sleeves open when needed, but yet staying securely closed during itchy periods.
• Gloves are impractical for older children
  As children get older and require access to their hands to eat and go to the toilet, it gets harder to help them quickly access their hands when needed for these important tasks, while still keeping them covered at other times. We found that using gloves really hindered this, especially while toilet training our toddler - when kids need to go, they need to go NOW and not wait for help to get the gloves off or in the case of tops with fully enclosed sleeves, the whole top off! It resulted in lots of dirtied gloves/tops and soiled clothing. No one needs that on top of everything else! 
• They're hard to keep on
  You've just spent 10 minutes of your valuable morning wrangling your child's fingers into their eczema glove, only to have them just pull them off in seconds! I think as an eczema mum I found this the single most frustrating part of using gloves. It was like it became a game for my toddler who love the challenge of pulling them off in true eczema child Houdini fashion!!
• Most are made from cotton
  Most eczema gloves are made from cotton and while it's often toted as an eczema friendly fabric, we found in our extensive research while creating our products that it definitely wasn't the softest or most breathable and hypo-allergenic for eczema skin. Bamboo fabric was by far a winner in all these aspects. We've also found that using natural silk combined with a bamboo fabric blend on our Eczema Mitten Sleeves provides additional smoothness to minimise any abrasion to skin that rubbing causes.
• Cotton gloves look clinical
  Especially as kids get older, they worry about what they wear and there's no denying that the standard white cotton gloves do look clinical and aren't very appealing to children, so they're less inclined to want to wear them, usually resulting in bigger fights to put them on and keep them on!
  We've completed a lot of careful consideration to create both our nightwear and daywear products that are both practical and stop scratching damage but as also cute, funky kid-friendly designs and colours that we know they LOVE wearing - we hear this from customers every day!

While cotton gloves for eczema do serve a purpose in some cases, we're proud that our Bamboo Bubby range of products go beyond this and provide more practical and appealing solutions for children of all ages and even now adults too thanks to our Adult Eczema PJ range.