Dear Sarah from exactly six months ago.
You're standing in aisle fourteen of Target. It's a Tuesday, I think. You're wearing those black maternity leggings that have the weird crusty yogurt stain on the left thigh that you swore you'd treat with stain remover but definitely haven't yet. You're holding an iced vanilla latte that's actively sweating condensation down your wrist and onto a massive plastic tub of ointment. Actually, you're holding two tubs.
One has a cute little pink-and-blue baby face on it and costs fourteen dollars. The other one is a slightly larger tub, plain white and blue label, no cute infant graphics, sitting in the adult skincare aisle for twelve dollars.
You're panic-texting Mike. You're building a care package for your sister Chloe, who's currently thirty-eight weeks pregnant and terrified, and you're trying to remember which version of the thick, greasy, miracle skin goop you used when Leo was a newborn. Your iced coffee drips onto your shoe. You buy the expensive one with the baby face because, oh god, what if the adult one burns my new nephew's delicate skin? What if it's full of acid? What if I'm a terrible sister?
I'm writing this to tell you to put the pink tub down and wipe the coffee off your shoe, because you're currently falling for the greatest marketing scam in modern parenting history.
The great aisle fourteen deception
So here's the wild, deeply annoying truth that I literally just found out like a month ago when I was cleaning out the nursery closet and actually read the backs of both bottles side-by-side. The infant version of Aquaphor and the regular healing ointment are the exact same thing.
I don't mean they're similar. I don't mean they're in the same family of products. I mean they're chemically, physically, 100 percent identical. The active ingredient in both is forty-one percent petrolatum. The inactive ingredients are all exactly the same too. I actually went completely unhinged and called the 1-800 number on the back of the jar while Maya was eating old Cheerios off the floor of the minivan, and the customer service rep basically laughed and confirmed that the baby-branded ointment is just packaged differently so tired, panicked parents can find it in the infant aisle.
That's it. That's the whole secret. We're paying a premium for a pastel label.
Anyway, I was putting together this massive care package for Chloe. I'd already bought her an organic cotton bodysuit from Kianao because Leo literally lived in his when he was a newborn, mostly because it had enough stretch to get over his massive ninety-ninth-percentile head without him screaming bloody murder. And obviously, I got her the flutter sleeve bodysuit too, because you can't resist a tiny ruffle when someone is having a girl.
I also threw in the rainbow play gym set which is super aesthetic for the living room, though honestly it ended up being just okay in the early days. It's a bit tall for a fresh newborn who just lies there like a sleepy potato, so she didn't really get into it until she was much older. I really should have just bought her the panda silicone teether instead since Maya chewed on hers like a feral little raccoon for an entire year.
But the point is, I was spending a fortune trying to get all the "right" baby-specific things, completely oblivious to the fact that I was getting played by the skincare industry.
What Dr. Aris seriously told me about butts
When Leo was about four months old, he got this rash. Not a cute little pinkness, but a raging, angry, angry rash that looked like he'd sat in a campfire.
I lugged him into the doctor's office, convinced I was failing at motherhood because I clearly couldn't even keep my kid's butt safe. Dr. Aris, who has the patience of a saint and always smells faintly of peppermint, explained how this specific brand of ointment genuinely works.
She told me that the forty-one percent petrolatum creates what she called a semi-occlusive barrier. I think that means it blocks the wetness from pee and poop but still lets the skin breathe a little bit? Or maybe it just traps the good moisture inside while keeping the bad moisture out. Honestly, I'm not a scientist and I was operating on three hours of sleep, but the gist of it was that it doesn't just seal the skin completely like pure Vaseline does.
It also has all this other stuff in it. Panthenol, which I guess is a vitamin B thing that calms down redness, and glycerin to draw in moisture, and bisabolol. Wait, is bisabolol a dinosaur? No, it's a chamomile derivative. I remember looking that up later because it sounded terrifying but it's honestly just flower juice.
But Dr. Aris was really clear about one massive mistake I was making. You have to really dry their little butt completely with a towel or let it air out before you slather the ointment on, otherwise you're just trapping the wet pee against the skin and making the rash ten times worse under a waterproof layer of grease.
The massive eco guilt trip
Here's where I've to confess something that makes me feel like a giant hypocrite. Mike and I try really hard to be conscious about what we buy. We recycle, we use organic sheets, we buy sustainable clothes whenever we can afford it, and we try to keep the plastic mountain in our house to a minimum.
And then I basically marinate my children in a fossil fuel byproduct.
Petrolatum is petroleum. It comes from the oil industry. When you really think about it, it's kind of gross. It's highly, highly refined to the point where it's medical-grade and totally safe and non-toxic according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, but environmentally? It's not exactly a win for the polar bears.
There are all these plant-based balms out there now. Stuff made from shea butter, calendula, cocoa butter, and beeswax. I've tried a bunch of them. Some of them smell amazing, like a fancy spa in your nursery, but if I'm being brutally honest with myself, none of them create that heavy-duty, industrial-strength waterproof shield that the petroleum-based stuff does when your kid has a stomach bug and is going through twelve diapers a day.
I just live with the guilt. I balance it out by buying bamboo toys and organic cotton, and I accept that infant skincare is the one area where my crunchy mom ideals go out the window in favor of pure, synthetic survival.
That one time we tried cloth diapers
Speaking of survival, let's talk about the Great Cloth Diaper Incident of 2019.
Before Leo was born, I had this vision of myself as an earth-goddess mother who would exclusively use organic cloth diapers. I bought a huge stash of them. They were adorable. They had little foxes and trees printed on the waterproof covers.
Three weeks in, Leo got a minor redness, so I grabbed a giant handful of the healing ointment and slathered him up, then strapped him into a pristine cloth diaper.
Mike, bless his deeply literal engineer heart, came into the nursery two hours later holding a leaking diaper away from his body like it was a radioactive bomb. The petroleum base in the ointment had completely coated the absorbent cloth fibers. It essentially waterproofed the inside of the diaper, causing all subsequent liquids to just roll right off the fabric and straight down Leo's leg onto the rug.
We ruined like four expensive cloth inserts before we realized what was happening. If you're going to use cloth diapers, you absolutely can't use petroleum-based ointments without a disposable liner, because you'll destroy your expensive eco-diapers in a matter of hours.
When the clear grease is not your friend
The other thing I wish I had known six months ago—or really, four years ago—is that this stuff is only for prevention and very mild redness.
Remember that awful rash Leo had that I mentioned earlier? The ointment honestly wasn't doing a damn thing for it. Because it was an active, weepy, raw rash, the skin didn't need moisture trapped against it. It needed to be dried out.
Dr. Aris told us to ditch the clear greasy ointment immediately and switch to a thick, white Zinc Oxide paste. The zinc is an astringent and genuinely draws the moisture out of the rash so it can heal. We used a maximum strength cream that basically felt like applying wet cement to a squirming infant, but it cleared the rash up in two days.
Now, my rule of thumb is simple. If the skin is just dry or slightly pink, I use the clear grease. If the skin is angry red, bumpy, or wet-looking, I bring out the heavy white zinc paste. I don't even bother with the middle-ground creams anymore.
Winter cheeks and weird neck cheese
Honestly, the best use for this stuff isn't even butts.
We live in a place where the winters are aggressively cold and windy. Maya has this incredibly sensitive skin that chaps the second the temperature drops below forty degrees. Before we go out to the playground, I take a tiny dab of the ointment and smear it across her cheeks and nose. It makes her look shiny and completely ridiculous, but it creates this perfect wind barrier so she doesn't come home looking like she has frostbite.
It's also weirdly good for that gross thing babies get in their neck folds. You know what I'm talking about. The neck cheese. When they're so chubby they've three chins, and milk and drool gets trapped in the folds and gets red and yeasty smelling. Once you finally get a wet washcloth in there and dry it out completely, a tiny swipe of the ointment prevents the friction from making it worse.
Anyway, the point is, stop stressing in the Target aisle. Stop thinking you need to buy the one with the baby on the label to be a good mom. Buy the big ugly tub from the adult aisle, save yourself three dollars, and spend that money on a fresh iced coffee. You're going to need it.
My messy, totally unscientific FAQ
Because I know you still have questions, and Google will just tell you your baby has a rare disease.
Is the infant version of the ointment really different?
No. Literally no. I called the company and asked. The ingredients are identical. The forty-one percent petrolatum is identical. The only difference is the pastel pink and blue labeling and the fact that they charge you more for it because they know tired parents will just grab whatever says "infant" on it without reading the fine print. Buy the regular tub.
Can I use it on their face for winter windburn?
Yeah, and it's honestly the best thing for it. I smear a thin layer on Maya's cheeks and nose before we go to the park in January. It acts like a little invisible shield against the wind. Just don't put too much on or they look like a slippery greased pig and everything sticks to their face, like dog hair and cracker crumbs.
Does it work for a really angry, red, weepy diaper rash?
Not in my experience, and Dr. Aris said no too. If the rash is raw, wet, or bleeding, you don't want to trap moisture over it with a petroleum barrier. You need something that dries it out. That's when you've to switch to a super thick zinc oxide cream—the white stuff that gets under your fingernails and refuses to wash off for three days.
Will it ruin my fancy organic cloth diapers?
Oh god, yes. I learned this the hard way and ruined fifty dollars worth of organic inserts. Petroleum jelly coats the fibers of cloth diapers and makes them repel water instead of absorbing it. If you use cloth, you either need to use a disposable liner inside the diaper to protect it from the ointment, or you need to switch to a plant-based, petroleum-free barrier balm.
Is it safe if they accidentally eat a little bit of it?
Look, obviously don't let them eat it like pudding. But Maya went through a phase where she would grab her own feet during diaper changes right after I applied it, and then immediately jam her toes in her mouth. My doctor said it's non-toxic and highly refined, so a tiny bit in their mouth isn't going to hurt them, it might just make their poop a little weird. Just keep the tub out of reach.
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