As a parent, seeing your child in pain or distress is a gut-wrenching feeling, especially when there's not much you can do to stop it.
This is how 24-year-old Danielle Wright-Humphreys felt when her daughter Lola Weston's body became engulfed in angry red eczema.
One month after Lola was born, Danielle noticed a small pink rash appear at the top of her cheek - which within two months had spread to the rest of her body, reports Wales Online.
Danielle, whose son has clear skin, was dumbfounded by Lola’s sudden and unexplained rashes which covered her belly and arms.
Living in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, with Lola, her brother Joey Weston, two, and her gas engineer fiancé Joe Weston, 25, she said: “I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I would put cream on her skin and it would flare up, all red and swollen, but when I didn’t, her skin would be so dry it started to chap and bleed.
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"If she scratched herself in the slightest, she would just start bleeding."
However, Danielle says that a miracle cream calmed her eczema "overnight," - and it costs less than £10.
"I started to think I would never find anything to make Lola’s skin better until someone told me about this £7.99 cream which I applied and the next day the rash had gone. I couldn’t believe it."
She said: "She was a month old when I noticed this little patch of dry skin on her cheek. It would flare up every now and then, but I didn’t think too much of it at first. I assumed it was just some irritation from her slobbering in the night. But then, at three months old, I woke up one day and she was trying to scratch herself. She had really dry skin and a rash all over her body."
Worried, Danielle sent an image to her doctor, who diagnosed it as eczema and prescribed a lotion and hydrocortisone cream. When she applied the lotion to Lola’s body, her skin immediately reacted.
She said: "Straight away she flared up with this bright red rash. We took her to the doctors and they advised using the hydrocortisone for a week before returning to the lotion, which briefly helped, but she still came up in the rash and it just got worse and worse. She was getting so upset, it was awful."
Danielle was devastated to see her usually happy baby "screaming" in frustration at the irritation the eczema caused.
"She is such a little happy baby but she really screamed and would be trying to scratch her body," she said. "She would be screaming and there was nothing I could do to console her, while my two-year-old was running around wanting my attention too. It was really hard. I felt so guilty and helpless. Whatever I did seemed to be wrong."
In a desperate attempt to stop Lola from scratching her skin red raw, Danielle started to put socks on her hands.
"It’s a time when you want them to learn to use their hands, but it was all I could do to stop her scratching," she said. "I would try to alternate between her wearing a baby grow and using the gloves."
Even simple tasks like trying to change Lola’s nappy or bath time became a struggle.
Danielle said: "She would start scratching her skin, so I would ask my little boy to hold her hands, then I could change her nappy without her scratching. We used to use normal baby bath stuff, but that reacted with her skin so we just used water, but it never felt like we were cleaning her properly.
"Joey and Lola used to bath together, too, but we had to stop that because the bath stuff we used for him would upset her skin."
She added: '""I also started to bath Lola every other day, so it didn’t dry her skin out. Even when I took Joey to soft play, I avoided Lola going in the ball pit, because I was worried her skin was so raw and prone to infection."
After two months of failing to find anything to help Lola, Danielle started to fear her skin would never clear.
She said: “We booked our wedding last month for February 2025 and I started to wonder if Lola would have bad skin on the day and if she would have a flare-up. It sounds silly but it goes through your mind. People were saying she would grow out of it, but looking at how bad it was, it was hard to imagine that."
Then, one of Danielle’s friends recommended Balmond’s Skin Salvation, a cream that retails for £7.99.
And while she admitted she had low expectations, she had nothing to lose, so she decided to give it a try.
"After a patch test, I put it all over her body and the next day, there was no redness or dryness. After two weeks, the eczema has completely gone. It’s like she never had any problems."
Danielle added: "She finally has normal baby skin, which is what I always wanted. It’s just made me so happy. I can’t stop looking at her skin.”
Danielle immediately bought another, bigger jar of the cream and is considering putting in a monthly subscription and using it as a preventative measure against the eczema returning. She said: “I was at the point where I felt like giving up but then found this cream and it has made such a difference."
For more information about the cream go to: www.balmonds.co.uk
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