Every two hours, seemingly harmless products like cologne, nail polish and remover, lotion, shampoo and makeup send a child to the hospital, a new report found.
There's something undeniably cute about a child trying to act grown-up by spritzing themselves with cologne, or smudging mom's lipstick around their mouths.
But getting into personal care products also leaves over 4,300 children under five poisoned or suffering chemical burns every year, a new Nationwide Children's Hospital study estimates.
The report's authors are urging parents everywhere to keep their cosmetics and toiletries out of sight, out of reach, and in the containers they came.
Their hope is that children won't be able to get to these products in the first place, but if they do, at least a picture on the package might signal to children that lotion is not, in fact, a tasty yogurt. And, worse comes to worst, parents will be able to identify what personal care product their child has mistakenly gotten into.
About 60 percent of the children that wound up in hospitals with personal care-related injuries were under two years old, so they were just learning to speak, and a long way off from being able to read.
