FLUSHING BANKNOTES DOWN THE TOILET (Kandoo Children's Toilet Wipes)

Member Name: MagdaDH

Product:	Kandoo Children's Toilet Wipes
Date:	15/10/04 (2048 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: wipes cleaner and surer than normal toilet paper or moist toilet tissue, supposedly more flushable than normal wipes

Disadvantages: very expensive, very strongly perfumed - what for?, enviromentaly suspicious

Kandoo Toilet Wipes claim to be first toilet tissue for your your little one .... or something to that effect. That was a put-off, as I do not like niche products much. A machine for cutting rose shapes out of radishes, a saloon for cutting hair of married women aged 30 to 50 of Armenian extraction, shoes that are good just for getting in and out of the car in - these are all things that I view with a great suspicion.

However, Katie is growing, she is toilet trained as far as the act itself goes; but she still needs help in the final (read: bum wiping) stages. So, I am thinking of ways to teach her to do it herself and as toilet wipes are marketed at precisely such buyers, and I had received a voucher for a L1 off a packet of Kandoo in the last mailing from Tesco Baby and Toddler Club, I decided to get a packet.

The result is this review. It is exclusively devoted to a bum-wiping product for preschoolers, there is no depth nor sophisticated irony of any kind. If you are not in a target market for this product, dear reader, do yourself a favour and stop now. I will not be offended, I promise.

(1) Packaging

I bought a refill packet - that seemed expensive enough and anyway I never ever saw much point in these dispenser boxes for normal wipes, being perfectly satisfied with a resealable refill packets. I will not change habits of three years of child breeding just for the benefit of providing the Ciao review with a dispenser section, sorry. The boxes did not allow me to not rate the dispenser so the rating is based on the look I had at the thing.

The refill packaging is colourful in green, orange and purple; and probably quite attractive to children; reseals well enough until you lose that top bit and provides almost all of the information anybody could desire, including a long and frightening list of ingredients. To my practically limited mind, it lacks a significant piece of data: despite searching and seeking, nowhere could I see information on how many actual wipes the packet contained. Weird. I wonder why. Perhaps it has something to do with the ease of calculating the unit cost for a piece of fibre measuring 2 by 3 inches, drenched in moisturiser and perfume.

(2) Main Function

That is, bum wiping. On this score Kandoo work OK. Nothing particularly brilliant (I wonder what a particularly brilliant bum wiping performance would entail, actually). They are moist, soft and do not tear, which is perhaps the most important factor if you are trying to encourage a three year old to do the wiping herself (not that my Katie was fooled, she has a very good grasp of her own abilities and even better one of the purpose of mummies, so nothing came of my attempt at encouraging independence. I cannot blame Kandoo for that. ).

The wipe is drenched in the usual wipey moisturiser and I have a strong impression that this one is not particularly friendly to sensitive skin. There was a slight almost-sting even during my own test run so I would be careful if the prospective user had a tendency to allergies or sensitive skin. It is possible that this effect is caused mainly by what is covered in no. 3.

(3) Fragrance

Kandoo wipes are fragranced - very definitely and strongly fragranced, in fact and I just cannot even imagine what purpose might it serve. They already contain a result of hard work of a little pharma-chemical factory and have no idea why a big dose of (not unpleasant itself, rather fruity-melony) fragrance was added.

There is another flavour apart form the Jungle Fruit I bought, but as far as I could see no unperformed version is available.

(4) Secondary functions

This is a failing. Normal wipes are usable for a variety of other purposes, including runny noses, mascara-ed eyes and tomato-sauce-covered faces. Due to the sting factor my one attempt at wiping a runny nose resulted in a scream, while the strong smell made them unpleasant alternative to serviettes. I did not dare to try them on my eyes.

(5) Flushability

I hasten to report that we have gone through most of the packet with no need for a plumber. However, I have to confess to a waste-disposal offence and say that I have been partial to flushing an occasional normal wipe (and sometimes, but rarely, two) both in Poland and in the UK and never caused a plumbing emergency either.

I have a cynical suspicion that instead of employing clever technology people at Pampers to invent a special kind of water-soluble wipe fibres (there is no indication of that on the packet), clever marketing people at Pampers decided to cut normal, thinnish wipes in half, outsourced a lab assistant to conduct a series of experiments to determine how many of such pieces can be actually flushed in one go (they advise against using more than 5, not that I can see any need) and then marketed them as flushable. Please correct me if I am wrong and I will amend. The pampers website claims them to be biodegradable, and I cannot refute it, but believe me, they look and feel just like thinner and smaller version of a normal wipe.

(6) Price and Value for Money

I saved it for later. But yes, you have guessed. The reason the voucher I received from Tesco was for a whole pound off became apparent as I approached the appropriate shelf: Kandoo toilet wipes are EXTORTIONATELY expensive. The packet of undeclared number I purchased with my voucher cost (in a large, out of town Tesco) L2.69. That was a refill, remember.

[since writing the above I have found out - from the Tesco website - there is 60 in the packet]

As a comparison: a packet of 80 decent quality normal wipes can be had in Aldi for 1.29; that 72 Tesco wipes cost less than 1.50 and Pampers charges 2.49 for 72 of their own baby wipes (all of these are bigger), not even mentioning the fact that a roll of Value toilet paper (from a packet of four) costs less than 11 pence.

(7) Verdict

Overall, Kandoo wipes proved to be what I just about suspected they were: a fundamentally simple thing, repackaged and repositioned by clever (or perhaps not so clever) marketing as a niche product for which a massive price premium is charged, ecologically dodgy (we should not flush wipes unless they really disintegrate), unnecessarily fragranced which renders them almost useless for any other wiping purpose. They wipe bums well, but so do 'normal' wipes, moist toilet tissue, and normal toilet paper can be moistened with a bit o baby cream or warm water if such necessity arises.

Will I buy them again? No, I will not. I would have not done it in the first place if it was not for the voucher; but I was contemplating buying a Tesco version. Now the trial of Kandoo convinced me that I am not one for niche products. Katie will have to do with universal white bog roll, I am afraid.

As many as two stars because they do not fail at the main task. Only two stars because they are a total rip-off and ecologically suspicious one to boot.


If you are wondering why this review does not contain any contracted forms and Saxon genetives, well, it was the only way to get rid of the funny codes that appear in the text; so it is an apostrophe-less and quote-less review.

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