Dressing a child with eczema

If your child has eczema, you already know the nights that follow the wrong outfit. The scratching at 2am, the red line where a seam sat, the sleeve that looked soft in the shop and wasn't. Fabric won't cure eczema, but the wrong fabric reliably makes it worse, and the clothing guidance for kids is unusually consistent:

• 100% breathable cotton
• flat seams
• tagless or printed labels
• no exposed elastic

Synthetics are the recurring villain. Not because polyester attacks skin on contact, but because it traps heat and moisture against it, and heat plus moisture is the classic setup for a flare-up.

Which makes the next fact genuinely uncomfortable. That "100% cotton" on the label is a claim, not a guarantee. A Dutch government-commissioned study by Circle Economy scanned more than 10,000 garments with near-infrared technology and found 41% of fibre-content labels inaccurate. Cotton-polyester blend labels were accurate only about 23% of the time, and roughly a third of cotton-rich blends overstated their cotton content. For most shoppers that's an annoyance. For a parent choosing cotton specifically to keep a child's skin calm, it's the difference between a treatment plan and a guess.

You can't feel a 30% polyester share with your fingertips. Blends are exactly where labels fail most, which is part of why we built an app that verifies what a fabric actually contains before it touches your child.

The low-tech checks still earn their keep. Turn garments inside out and run a finger along every seam your child's skin will meet. Reject anything with a stitched-in neck tag or elastic sitting on bare skin. Wash new clothes before first wear in fragrance-free detergent. And when a "cotton" garment keeps triggering flares even though you've done everything right, trust the skin over the label. The skin, in this case, is the more honest witness.