Happy Birthday Barbie .. I'm Not Allergic to You

I just got an email reminding me that it is Barbie’s birthday today. I can’t believe I forgot. It did remind me of a problem one of our customers had.

A few years ago we had a customer call and she thought her daughter may be allergic to her toys, one being her Malibu Barbie and she would be devastated it she had to stop playing with her.

Little girls do love their dolls.

I told her the good thing is unless she allergic to vinyl she is more than likely not allergic to her Barbie doll. Based on what she told me about her daughter’s room I suspected she was allergic to dust mites and dust in general.

Her daughter also collected stuffed animals, had lots of books, drapes and carpeting. All of these are what we consider dust collectors. For a child or adult with allergies the fewer dust collectors in the bedroom the better.

Many people think of dust mites as little bugs that crawl on you. While it is true they maybe crawling on you, that is not what is causing the allergic reaction, it is the protein found in their feces and body parts. These dust mite allergens are just part of what makes up regular household dust.

I explained to her that she needed to do several things in her daughter’s bedroom to fix the problem;

• Do a deep cleaning including the carpets and drapes. (she did not want to get rid of them)

• Remove all the stuffed animals her daughter did not play with. Those that she did needed to be cleaned. If she did not want to wash them then she needed to toss them in the freezer overnight and then put them in the dryer the next day. This way the dust mites in the stuffed animals would die and the dryer would remove a good portion of their allergens.

• Keep the books in plastic tubs with a lid.

• Cover her mattress with a dust mite cover.

• Wash her sheets weekly in very hot water or use the Allergen Wash or De-mite laundry additive.

• Make sure she did her cleaning early in the day. This way the allergens she stirred up would settle before her daughter took her nap.

We also discussed using the anti allergen sprays, carpet treatments and air cleaners but decided to take it one step at a time. I guess I should have told her to give Barbie a bath too. I’m sure she needed one.

She didn’t place an order with me that day, she may have gone online and placed it later, so I don’t know what ever happened. All I do know is I can pretty much say with 100% certainty that her daughter was not allergic to Barbie.

800 771-ACHOO (2246)