A warning is being issued to people who have young kids and use laundry pods, those squishy little packets of detergent that have recently been introduced to the market. Some kids are mistaking the pods for candy and toys, and eating laundry detergent naturally is going to cause illness. One child has died from ingesting the stuff.
The recommendation is that the detergent manufacturers redesign packaging to make it more difficult for the very young to get into, and put more prominent warnings on it so parents put it in a harder to reach location. All of which is fine, though making the packaging too difficult will make old fashioned jugs of liquid the most appealing laundry alternative yet again. What this case highlights is a struggle that is inherent in product design.
The issue was basically inevitable, because once you make a product that works you have to sell them, and the way most products are sold is to make them look good. Cleaning products are no exception, look at any soap in your house and you'll get bright, appealing colours, pictures of the delicious foods they supposedly smell like, and an attempt to make them look more exciting and appealing than the cleaning drudgery that they actually are designed to facilitate.
These pods are no exception. The standard models are generally bright orange and blue, the colours of oranges and blueberries, two great candy flavors. The reason behind this is not that anyone wants someone to eat the detergent - they very much don't - but because it appeals to our senses and makes us want to use them on our clothes. If you get the dye-free versions, as I did because most detergent scents give me a splitting headache, it's a much less appealing white and pale yellow. The clothes are just as clean, and you don't have dyes, but if you're going for pure eye appeal, white and pale yellow looks like a winter emergency, which has a much less pleasing connotation than oranges and blueberries.
As adults, we understand the distinction between food and soap, but a toddler is just figuring these things out. That's why toddlers put so many things in their mouth, including these detergent pods, unfortunately. In making things look good for the adults, companies will design products to recall foods. The problem becomes that in recalling pleasing sensations for mom and dad, they set an unintentional trap for baby. After all, from the perspective of someone with limited experience in the world, there's a picture of a green apple on the bottle, it's a neat green, that bottle of dish soap has to be some sort of apple candy right?
We're probably not going to see the end of selling things that aren't food with methods that recall everyone's favorite foods, it works incredibly well. As consumers, we can recognize it but also embrace it, because many people like the scents and colours. But we do have to realize that if we're building these products to resemble food, we're going to see the very young get confused by them. We have to recognize that the trap exists, and find a way to make sure the kids can recognize the trap as well. It does come down to an individual level, parents more than anyone else, but it's going to be an issue so long as our cleaning products look so tasty.
