For quite a few years I have been suffering from intermittent eczema (or something that fits right in with the description of eczema). One minute I’ll be all right, the next my skin feels like the surface of an orange and is itching like mad. If I scratch, it gets sore.
I usually get it on my forearms. It can also appear on my right upper arm (rarely my left), my stomach or groin, my hips, behind my knees, or on my shins. When it’s really bad I can feel it on my back. It doesn’t usually occur in all these places at once – it moves around!
When I first went to my doctor, he gave me some anti-allergy tablets but that was all (he didn’t diagnose eczema or anything else). After some time I stopped taking them because they didn’t seem to be working, and I just put up with the bouts of itching. But more recently I had been noticing that the smell of my clothes after washing seemed to correlate to the itching starting. In one particular case, I could associate the smell with a distinct feeling of being sunburnt.
Pure Soap Flakes
It occurred to me that it might be detergent-related – and after looking it up, irritation due to biological detergents did seem to be an issue.
To cut an already-long story short, I bought some soap flakes from an online store (they weren’t easy to find locally) and started using these instead of washing powder.
The intense itching cleared up almost overnight.
There was one hiccup, where I put on a shirt which had been washed with washing powder some weeks ago (all hell broke loose on my arms again), but after washing everything in the wardrobe… so far, so good.
There’s another bonus, too. They work out at around £2.00 a pack, after postage (or £1.50 if you can get them from a shop). Something like Ariel costs nearly £4.00. You use a hell of a lot less, so the pack lasts a lot longer. All you do is put a small amount in hot water and dissolve it with a whisk, then put it in the powder compartment of your washing machine.
White vinegar works as a softener (to avoid using the commercial softener, which I also suspected of making me itch). A drop or two of lemon oil or lavender oil (from an aromatherapy shop) adds a slight fragrance.