Whoopsie Wipes for adults

A Whoopsie Wipes square is an eight-inch piece of soft cotton with nothing on it, and adults find uses for that faster than we can list them. Warm water and a square takes a day’s makeup off without a cleanser, and the square goes in the bin rather than staining a flannel. A dry square dries hands and a face at a sink with no towel, and lives in a gym bag or a glovebox for a year without going off, because there is nothing in it to go off. After a bidet, a dry square does what the toilet paper was failing to do. One buyer with a broken wrist wrote to say exactly that, and we print the comment as it came.

The other adult job is care. A hospital bed, a parent at home after an operation, a grandparent who cannot get to the shower every day: warm water and a cotton square is a bed bath the way a nurse does it, one square per area, thrown away afterwards, nothing perfumed on skin that is already tired. The square is not sterile and does not claim to be, and it is not a substitute for a wash with soap; it is the soft, clean, disposable cloth that every one of those jobs needs a stack of. For a house where the grown-ups use them as well as the baby, the twelve-pack at five cents a square is the only box that makes sense.