What Do You Do for a Reaction to Soap Detergent?

Skin irritation is annoying, unattractive, and sometimes even painful. Even worse is when you experience skin irritation due to the detergent you used in the laundry. The detergent likely touched your clothing, your towels and your bedding, making each of these things irritants of your skin reaction. Always consult your doctor regarding the best treatment for skin reactions, and in the meantime do what you can to lessen your exposure to the irritants.

Remove the Irritant

Immediately discontinue your exposure to the detergent that caused the reaction. You will need to rewash any clothing or linens that have been exposed to the detergent to remove the irritants from those items. When gathering these items and rewashing them, wear cotton or rubber gloves to avoid touching the irritants with your hands. Also, make sure that you are not also suffering a reaction from other soaps in your home, as well as lotions, perfumes or other cleaning agents. Immediately discontinue contact with any of those items if they also cause you irritation.

Change Detergent

In order to rewash all those clothes and linens, you’ll need a good detergent to get all the irritation-causing chemicals out. Look for hypoallergenic laundry detergent in the laundry aisle of your grocery store. You can even make your own hypoallergenic detergent by grating 1 bar of any hypoallergenic soap and combining it with 1/2 cup borax and 1/2 cup washing soda, then using 1 to 2 tablespoons of that detergent per load of laundry. Also, make sure every little bit of soap is rinsed out of your laundry by adding a final rinse to remove lingering soap. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons of vinegar to the final rinse of the laundry cycle to remove residue (don’t worry, the vinegar also washes out and leaves no smell behind).

Relieve the Rash

After removing the irritants that cause the rash, next you need to deal with the rash itself. Your doctor may give you an oral or topical antihistamine. Hydrocortisone cream soothes the skin affected by a rash and helps get rid of the rash at the same time. Try an oatmeal bath to soothe the skin. Oatmeal baths do not rid you of rashes, but they can soothe itching and irritation.