Bloom Newborn Bath Tub with Sling

Details

A bath tub that covers the whole first year. A mesh sling clips in for a newborn who cannot hold their own head, and unclips at around four months to leave a moulded backrest and a bump that stops a sitting baby sliding forward. The material is virgin polypropylene copolymer, and the word doing the work is virgin. The cheap route in moulded plastic is regrind, reprocessed scrap of unknown origin, and what a regrind carries depends entirely on what it used to be. This is first-use resin, wall 3.5 mm, unpainted inside, and the rim is tested for migration of certain elements to IS 9873 Part 3, because a wet baby will get their mouth on a rim. The sling is polyester mesh and we are printing that rather than letting the cotton in the rest of this house imply otherwise. Cotton mesh sags when it is wet and a sagging sling drops a newborn's head towards the water, which is the one thing a sling exists to prevent. Polyester holds its tension wet. It is the right material and it is a synthetic, and both of those are true at once. Stability and grip are numbers here rather than adjectives. Filled to the line with 18 litres and loaded with 12 kg at the rim, the tub holds through a 10 degree tilt without going over. The seat area and the four feet are tested to DIN 51097, the barefoot wet slip standard, at class C, which is the highest of the three.

• Virgin polypropylene copolymer, no regrind, wall 3.5 mm, unpainted inside
• Migration of certain elements to IS 9873 Part 3 on the rim and the seat, all nineteen below the limit of quantification
• Wet slip resistance class C to DIN 51097 on the seat and on all four feet, which is the class used for pool surrounds
• Stability: 18 litres plus a 12 kg load at the rim, held through a 10 degree tilt without overturning
• Mesh sling in polyester, not cotton, because cotton mesh sags wet and a sagging sling lowers a newborn's head. Machine washable at 40 C
• Drain plug at the foot end, 32 mm, empties 18 litres in about 90 seconds
• 76 cm x 44 cm x 24 cm, 1.9 kg empty, 18 litres to the moulded fill line at 10 cm. Fits across a standard bathtub or sits on a counter
• Filled, it weighs about 20 kg. That is the entire argument for the drain plug, and carrying it full while holding a wet baby is not a plan
• Fill to the moulded line and no further. Water at 37 C, tested with your elbow or a thermometer, never with your hand
• The one that matters more than everything above: never leave a baby in the bath. Not for a doorbell, not for a phone, not with an older child watching. A baby can drown in a few centimetres of water and it happens in silence and in under a minute
• Honest trade-off: this is bulky, it is used for about a year, and a clean plastic tub or a kitchen sink washes a baby perfectly well. The part that is hard to improvise is the sling, and the sling only matters for the first four months. Buy it for those four months or do not buy it
• Drain, rinse and stand it on edge after every bath. Standing water in a moulded seat is how a tub grows a film