A Review of Ecostore Foaming Hand Wash

A Review of Ecostore Foaming Hand Wash

Tuesday, 17 June 2014

When I was asked to review the ecostore foaming hand wash, I thought I would write a review that talked about how four year olds are made entirely of mud and snot and how this soap was so much fun it even made them want to get clean.

I spent some time on the ecostore website so I would feel like I could speak with authority about its goodly credentials and I was blown away to learn that there are only 9 chemicals in the Foaming Hand Wash, and all of them have an awesome safety rating. 

The lack of nasties made me feel comfortable that I wasn't exposing my children to anything that would poison them, even if the amazing fragrances made it difficult to persuade them that they weren't supposed to be eaten. 

Then my life happened and this review turned into something completely different.

We have a chilli bush which this year grew a vast array of very red and very spicy little chillies. When I say vast array I am being conservative so on Saturday when I was relatively child free, I wrapped Miss Olive on my back and attacked the bush with scissors and a bowl.

She slept soundly through my long and torturous harvest. She slept soundly thought my search for a needle and thread. She even slept soundly while I stabbed chilli after chilli onto a long garland to be hung and dried.

Eventually she woke and, as she so often does, realised that she had a serious hunger and MUST BE FED NOW.

As her in-house slave I rushed to the fridge, grabbed her feeder and hustled to the sofa. A few seconds later I had untied her, attached the SNS, and she began to nurse.

Trapped under a feeding baby, my thoughts drifted back to the truck load of super hot chillies and how I was going to get rid of them when two fifths of the family are chilli-phobic. My thoughts drifted, but wouldn't settle because something was bugging me, something baby shaped and fussy.

Miss Olive was squirming and trying to nurse, but something was putting her off. I assumed she was teething and held down her feeder with my finger while latching her on again, smiling encouragingly at her for good measure.

No dice.

Now Miss Olive was clearing her throat to make known her unhappiness.

I sighed, dropping my head to wipe hair and tiredness from my face.

I felt the sting a split second before my brain registered what I had done. 

The heat was spreading and tears were starting to fall from my eye onto the baby who was now spluttering at the heat in her mouth and the isolated rain shower that seemed to have sprung up above her face.

The chillies. My hands. How could I have been so stupid?!?

Because babies steal your brains faster than any zombie, that’s how.

So trapped under a now howling baby, blind in one eye and desperately trying not to touch ANYTHING, I was forced to make some hard choices.

The first choice was to deposit the extremely angry baby on the sofa by standing up and rolling her gently off my lap. Landing in a pile of cushions, none of which were feeding her milk, did nothing to improve her mood so the soundtrack to my half blind stumble into the kitchen was in the same ballpark as that of an axe murder.

Somehow I found myself in front of the sink and faced with a line-up of cleaning products. Wrestling the tap on full with my wrists my mind wandered back to the ingredients list of the Foaming Hand Wash. 

“It’s full of GOOD THINGS!!” my brain said, ”safe enough to wash everything you need to wash and not poison the baby”

That was a good enough selling point for me because the one thing that would have made this whole debacle worse would have been that awkward conversation with a medical professional about how I had managed to poison my baby with both chilli AND cleaning products.

My scent of choice, should you be wondering, was Cucumber and Bergamot, because for some reason my brain came up with the logic that cucumber is cooling and that would be a good thing to reverse the effects of chilli. 

Sometimes I think it’s lucky for the world that my job doesn't involve heavy machinery.

And if I am being entirely honest, there was a part of me wondering whether the “gentle cleansers” were going to be able to cut through the napalm like quality of my hands while praying that the claims of leaving my skin “soft, silky and clean without drying or irritation” were accurate; especially since some of that skin formed an integral and very sensitive part of my baby feeding system ifyaseewhatImean.

I'm happy to report that the claims were accurate on both counts. After a good wash both my hands, and boobs were back in working order. It look me some time and a lot of cuddles to persuade a reproachful baby that the coast was clear, but I think the gentle fragrance helped take her mind off the searing pain in her mouth long enough to feed.

I think ecostore should brag about this whole episode in the tagline of their next advert:

Foaming Handwash: Your baby will prefer it to chilli boobs!

You're welcome ecostore, you’re welcome.

Thank you to Kiwi Mummy Blogs for sending me that little slice of awesome.