The Absurd Truth About The Baby Camel Trend Invading London

Tom
2026-04-15T12:32:45+02:00

I was standing in a fiercely over-lit organic grocer in Hackney at 7:15 in the morning, holding a squirming toddler under one arm like a bag of wet cement, when I saw it. A tiny, violently expensive glass bottle labeled 'raw baby camel milk.' Twin A was currently trying to lick the barcode off a bruised aubergine, and I was sleep-deprived enough to briefly consider whether this exotic desert secretion was the magical superfood that would finally make her sleep through the night.

If you've spent more than five minutes on parenting TikTok recently, you've probably been aggressively targeted by the camel trend. It started as a whisper among the coastal wellness influencers and has now fully breached the M25. Suddenly, everyone is either feeding their child camel milk, wrapping them in camel wool, or reading them fables about desert livestock. It's exhausting, frankly, so I've spent the last week trying to figure out which parts of this trend are actually useful and which parts are just expensive nonsense designed to make tired parents feel inadequate.

The great milk delusion

Let's tackle the biggest and most dangerous myth first: the milk. There's a deeply chaotic corner of the internet insisting that camel milk is a miracle cure-all for infants, meant to magically resolve eczema, allergies, and probably your mortgage rate. I actually brought this up at our last NHS checkup, mostly because I was running on four hours of sleep and wanted to know if I was failing my children by giving them standard cow's milk.

Dr. Patel looked at me over his glasses with the specific kind of big exhaustion usually reserved for politicians and preschool teachers. He explained that replacing human breastmilk or heavily regulated infant formula with the milk of an animal designed to survive sandstorms is an incredibly bad idea for babies under twelve months. From what I managed to absorb while Twin B was actively attempting to eat the crinkly paper off the examination table, human babies need extremely specific ratios of iron and fats for brain development, and the massive protein load in animal milks can apparently put a terrifying amount of stress on their tiny, developing kidneys.

The raw milk aspect is even more terrifying, honestly. The wellness crowd loves raw milk, but unless you thoroughly pasteurize this stuff to boil away the absolute roulette wheel of bacteria (which include things I can't even pronounce but sound entirely incompatible with a functioning digestive tract), you're putting your toddler at massive risk just to be trendy. If you've got an older toddler with a cow's milk allergy and you want to try pasteurized camel milk as an alternative, definitely run it past your GP first rather than taking medical advice from an influencer whose primary qualification is owning a ring light.

Some people claim it tastes exactly like normal milk, but honestly, it just tastes like slightly salty water.

Why the wool is actually brilliant

Now, while I won't be pouring desert livestock milk into my daughters' sippy cups anytime soon, the textile side of this trend is a completely different story. Baby camel wool (which is usually just the downy undercoat that the young animals naturally shed in the spring, so nobody is shearing them against their will) is honestly a bit of a marvel for infant clothing.

Twin A inherited my outrageously sensitive skin, meaning the moment she overheats in a synthetic jumper, she breaks out in a rash that requires industrial amounts of Calpol and hydrocortisone. I've always struggled with sheep's wool because of the lanolin, which seems to trigger contact dermatitis in our house within minutes. Baby camel hair naturally lacks lanolin, making it famously hypoallergenic, and I'm fairly certain its evolutionary purpose to keep animals warm in freezing desert nights and cool during boiling days is why it works so well for babies who haven't quite figured out how to control their own body temperature yet.

Of course, outfitting twins entirely in luxury camel hair would require me to sell a kidney, so for everyday wear, we rely on high-quality organic cotton to achieve the exact same skin-saving results. The Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie from Kianao has been an absolute lifesaver in our flat. I don't know what kind of black magic goes into harvesting this specific cotton, but it doesn't cause a single red patch on Twin A's arms, and the envelope shoulders mean I can pull it down over her body when we've a catastrophic nappy leak, rather than dragging a ruined garment over her head and contaminating her face.

Toys that don't cause concussions

If you're trying to curate a sustainable nursery that feels connected to nature, you've probably noticed the overwhelming pressure to buy educational toys. We were gifted the Gentle Baby Building Block Set recently. I'll be perfectly honest with you—they're fine. The product description suggests these blocks will teach your three-month-old simple mathematical equations, which feels wildly optimistic for a child who just spent twenty minutes trying to eat my left slipper.

But here's why I honestly keep them around: they're entirely soft. When Twin B inevitably decides that physics is fun and lobs a block directly at my head while I'm drinking my morning coffee, it simply bounces off without causing a concussion or waking the neighbors. They're also incredibly easy to wash in the sink after they've been dragged through whatever sticky residue currently coats our kitchen floor.

If you prefer your toys to be a bit more aesthetically pleasing and slightly less likely to be used as projectiles, check out Kianao's wooden play gym collection, which really looks quite nice in a living room without screaming 'a chaotic toddler lives here.'

A story about humps and London flats

The weirdest part of this whole trend is the sudden resurgence of the classic baby camel fable in our local playgroups. If you aren't familiar, it's a story where a young calf asks its mother why they've huge humps, long legs, and massive eyelashes. The mother explains that the humps store water for the desert, the legs figure out the sand, and the eyelashes keep the storms out of their eyes. The punchline, delivered by the baby, is essentially: 'Then what on earth are we doing sitting in a zoo?'

It's meant to be a big lesson about how your unique traits are only useful if you're in the right environment, but honestly, it just makes me think about parenting in a tiny London flat. The twins have boundless, terrifying energy designed for roaming open plains and climbing things, and instead, I'm constantly hovering behind them yelling at them to stop trying to scale the television stand or lick the communal hallway walls.

We try to channel that energy into slightly safer indoor environments. The Rainbow Play Gym Set with Animal Toys is quite good for this, especially in the early months. It's made of actual wood instead of that garish plastic that makes your retinas bleed, and the little hanging elephant gives them something to aggressively bat at while I sit on the sofa for three minutes and try to remember what my life was like before I knew the exact price of organic cotton.

Ultimately, whether you're navigating the bizarre world of toddler superfoods or just trying to find clothing that doesn't make your kid break out in hives, you just have to trust your gut, ignore the influencers, and maybe invest in some exceptionally soft fabrics to preserve your sanity.

Before you fall down another late-night rabbit hole of questionable parenting advice, you might want to explore Kianao's full range of sustainable, non-irritating essentials to find things that seriously work for your family.

Frequently Asked Parent Panic Questions

Is any unpasteurized milk safe for my baby?
Look, I'm not a doctor, but our pediatrician made it abundantly clear that raw milk is essentially a petri dish. Young babies don't have the immune systems to fight off the heavy-hitting bacteria found in unpasteurized products, so boiling the life out of it (or just buying the safe, standard stuff) is the only way to avoid spending your weekend in A&E.

Why does everyone care about lanolin suddenly?
Lanolin is the wax secreted by sheep to waterproof their wool, and while it's great for sheep standing in the Scottish rain, it's a massive trigger for eczema in some babies (like mine). Camel hair, alpaca, and good organic cotton don't have it, which means fewer mysterious rashes to frantically Google at 2 AM.

Do I really need educational toys for a three-month-old?
No. At three months old, your baby considers their own hands to be a groundbreaking scientific discovery. Buy toys that are safe to chew on, won't break your nose when thrown, and look nice enough that you don't resent tripping over them in the dark.

How do I wash these natural fiber clothes without ruining them?
With a healthy dose of fear and a 40-degree gentle cycle. Don't use fabric softeners because it coats the fibers and ruins the breathability, and for the love of everything, keep them out of the tumble dryer unless you want to accidentally shrink a premium bodysuit into something that would only fit a small doll.