Real Baby Rash Types With Pictures So You Can Stop Panicking

It was 2:14 AM and I was sitting on the edge of the nursery glider in Dave’s stained Villanova hoodie, completely paralyzed by fear, holding my iPhone flashlight about a quarter-inch from my three-week-old son’s cheek.

Leo was fast asleep, totally oblivious, but his tiny, previously flawless face was suddenly covered in these aggressive, angry red pimples. I had a cup of coffee on the nightstand that had been cold since noon, and I remember frantically typing baby rash types with pictures on face into my browser with one thumb because I was convinced my newborn was going through puberty or had contracted some medieval plague.

Google, as we all know, is a terrible place for an anxious mother at 3 AM.

If you’re reading this right now while staring at a weird spot on your kid’s chin and hyperventilating, just take a breath. I’ve been doing this parenting thing for seven years now—Maya is 7 and Leo is 4—and I can tell you that babies are basically just incredibly cute, highly reactive skin sacks that break out if the wind blows the wrong way.

Anyway, I thought it would be helpful to just walk through what actually happened with my kids’ skin over the years, in order, because God knows I needed someone to just show me what this crap actually looks like in real life.

The iPhone flashlight panic phase (Neonatal Acne & Milia)

So back to Leo at three weeks old. His face looked like a slice of pepperoni pizza. It was mostly on his cheeks and his little button nose, and I was absolutely terrified that I had done something wrong, like maybe I was eating too much dairy or I hadn't washed his sheets in the right organic unicorn-tears detergent.

I dragged him to the doctor the next morning.

Dr. Miller, who's a saint and has seen me cry over literally nothing at least forty times, just kind of chuckled and told me it was neonatal acne. Apparently, it has something to do with my hormones still circulating in his tiny body from when he was in the womb, which just makes oil glands go totally crazy.

She told me the absolute worst thing I could do was put adult acne creams on it because newborn skin is basically paper and salicylic acid would burn his little face off, so I should just wash it with warm water and leave it the hell alone until it went away on its own a few weeks later.

He also had these tiny, hard, pearly-white bumps on his nose. They looked like little seeds trapped under the skin. Dr. Miller said they were called Milia, which is just dead skin flakes trapped in small pockets near the surface, and again, if you try to pop them or scrub them you're going to make everything worse, so you just have to wait for the pores to open up naturally.

That one that looks like literal flea bites (ETN)

Now, Maya’s birth was a whole different skin nightmare. Two days after she was born, while we were still in the hospital trying to figure out how to swaddle without making her look like a burrito that was falling apart, she broke out in these blotchy red spots.

And I mean, they looked EXACTLY like flea bites. They had a red base with a little white or yellow bump right in the middle.

I buzzed the nurse in an absolute panic because I thought the hospital bassinet was infested with bugs. The nurse didn't even blink. "Oh, that's Erythema Toxicum Neonatorum," she said, sounding bored.

First of all, "Toxicum" sounds like a Harry Potter curse, but apparently it's just an early immune response that like half of all newborns get. It means absolutely nothing and it fades away completely on its own within a week, so we just took a million photos of her looking slightly blotchy and moved on.

Drool and the chin destruction

Fast forward to when Leo was around four months old. This is when the drool apocalypse began. He was chewing on his hands, his toys, my nose, the dog's ear—literally anything he could get into his mouth.

Because his chin was constantly wet, the skin around his mouth and inside those adorable, chubby neck folds started breaking down. It was bright red, irritated, slightly raised, and smelled vaguely of sour milk and old cheese.

Dave, my husband, was convinced it was because Leo kept dropping his pacifier on the floor and putting it back in his mouth. So Dave went on this whole late-night Amazon binge and bought all these different clips, but we eventually landed on these Pacifier Clips with Wood & Silicone Beads from Kianao. They're... fine. I mean, they're actually really pretty, the wood is nice and smooth, and they do technically stop the pacifier from hitting the dirty rug, but I honestly always forget to clip the damn things onto his shirt before we leave the house. Dave loves them, though, so whatever.

The real issue was the moisture sitting on the skin. I realized I had to get the wet synthetic fabric away from his neck.

I ended up switching almost all his daytime clothes to the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit Sleeveless Infant Onesie. This thing really worked because organic cotton breathes, unlike the cheap polyester stuff my mother-in-law kept buying us that trapped the drool against his chest like a wet sauna. I'd pat his neck completely dry with a burp cloth, smear a thick layer of petroleum jelly in the folds to create a barrier, and leave him in the sleeveless onesie so the air could get to it.

When their body gets angry (Eczema)

Okay, this is the one that honestly broke my heart and ruined my sleep for like six straight months.

When Maya hit six months, she developed eczema. It wasn't just a little red baby rash. It was these intense, dry, scaly, violently itchy patches inside her elbow creases and behind her knees. She would scratch herself bloody in her crib at night.

I need to pause here and mention something super important that my friend Aisha told me. We were sitting in my kitchen drinking lukewarm coffee, and she was saying that on her daughter’s beautiful dark skin, eczema didn’t look red or pink at all. It looked like these ashy, purplish, or dark grayish patches. My doctor confirmed later that rashes show up totally differently depending on melanin levels, and it drives me crazy that all the medical pamphlets only show white babies.

Anyway, eczema is heavily triggered by heat and synthetic fibers.

I threw away so much stuff. Fleece sleep sacks? Garbage. Polyester blends? Donated. I'm unhealthily obsessed with Kianao's Organic Baby Romper Long Sleeve Henley Winter Bodysuit for this exact reason. I bought six of them. Because during the winter, you need them to be warm, but if an eczema baby gets even slightly sweaty, their skin flares up immediately. This romper has a three-button henley neck so it's super easy to get over her giant head, but more importantly, it's 95% organic cotton, so her skin could genuinely breathe.

For sleep, we layered that under the Bamboo Baby Blanket in Blue Floral. Listen, bamboo fabric is magical. It's naturally cooling and soaks up sweat. The second we stopped putting her under heavy microfiber blankets and switched to this silky bamboo one, she stopped waking up at 4 AM trying to scratch her legs off.

(Oh, quick side note: Maya also had cradle cap for like three days, and I just rubbed some coconut oil on her head, let it sit, and combed the flakes out with a soft baby brush, and it literally never came back, so I don't even care about that one.)

If you're dealing with angry skin right now, you might want to look at Kianao's organic cotton clothing collection because synthetic fabrics are just the devil for rashes.

That one weird trick with a glass

Okay, so 99% of the time, a rash is just your baby being a baby.

But there's one thing Dr. Miller taught me that I think about every single time I see a spot on my kids. It’s called the Glass Test.

When Leo was eight months old, he spiked a fever of 102. Naturally, I panicked. Then I noticed these little purplish-red spots on his tummy. I remembered Dr. Miller telling me to take a clear drinking glass and press it firmly against the rash.

Most normal rashes—like heat rash or viral hives—will blanch. That means when you press the glass down, the pressure pushes the blood out of the capillaries, and the skin turns white under the glass.

If you press the glass down and the spots stay perfectly red or purple and DO NOT fade, you put the baby in the car and you drive to the emergency room immediately, don't pass go, don't wait for your husband to find his wallet, because a non-blanching rash with a fever can be a sign of Meningitis or Sepsis.

Leo’s spots faded under the glass. It turned out to just be Roseola, a super common virus that causes a fever for three days followed by a harmless rash. But doing that test kept me from having a total mental breakdown in my kitchen.

The rule in our house now is: if there's a fever, if the rash is oozing yellow crusty stuff (which could be Impetigo), or if the kid is acting lethargic and not themselves, we go to the doctor. If they're acting totally normal and just look a little splotchy, I just put them in breathable clothes and drink my cold coffee.

Before we get into the messy questions at the end, seriously go check out their breathable baby blankets if you want your eczema-prone kid to really sleep tonight.

Messy questions you're probably asking yourself right now

Are drool rashes going to leave a permanent scar on my baby's chin?

Oh god no. I thought Leo’s chin was permanently disfigured because it looked like raw hamburger meat for two solid months. But newborn skin heals amazingly fast once you remove the moisture. Keep it dry, slather on some Vaseline or Aquaphor to block the spit, and it'll eventually look like it never happened.

How do I know if it's eczema or just normal dry winter skin?

I had no idea honestly until Dr. Miller explained it to me, but normal dry skin is just kind of flaky everywhere, whereas eczema usually shows up in patches—especially in the creases of their elbows, behind their knees, or on their cheeks—and it's intensely, furiously itchy. If they're trying to rub their face against the carpet like a bear scratching an itch on a tree, it's probably eczema.

Can I just put breastmilk on the rash?

People on the internet are absolutely obsessed with putting breastmilk on everything from ear infections to scraped knees. Look, breastmilk has great antibodies, and I rubbed it on a few minor scratches, but if your kid has a yeast diaper rash or a bacterial skin infection, breastmilk has sugar in it, which can literally feed the yeast and make it worse. So maybe don't use it as a cure-all without asking your doctor first.

Is it normal for a rash to look worse after a bath?

Yes! Every single time I took Maya out of the tub, her eczema looked ten times redder and angrier than when she went in. Heat increases blood flow to the skin, which makes everything look super inflamed. That's why you should only use lukewarm water for baths, keep them super short, and immediately trap the moisture in with a thick, fragrance-free cream the second you pat them dry.