If your kids are like mine, they are always getting a little too much sun. If you are like me or my wife, you are always slapping sunscreen on them. The word "slapping" comes from the perception that parents are too rough when applying it (not true!). Luckily, today there are new sprays that do not need to be rubbed in at all - very cool. But, you still need to do it to get the protection. And, there's no guarantee you'll get it everywhere.
So, a little sun doesn't hurt, right? Actually it does hurt and skin cancer is a huge problem. A problem that will likely get worse as the BOC (baby oil crowd) heads into retirement age. Yes, instead of protecting our skin, we used to target the sun like a magnifying glass on our skin. My doctor tried to play the scared straight game with me a few years back by saying that all the freckles on my skin were evidence of damage from prior years. To prove his point, he asked me to compare the skin on my shoulders (lotsa sun) with that on my rear end (little sun - one summer in Steamboat Springs Colorado is all I can remember). I promise, no pictures.
Anyway, back to the idea.
So how do we make skin protection a no-brainer for adults and easy for parents?This idea is called Shower Hands™ and it came to me one day a few years back when I was applying liquid fertilizer to the lawn. I was doing it with one of those handy bottles that you attach to the garden hose. It meters out a set amount of fertilizer as you spray.
Thus the idea below - straight from my idea book:
Notice I didn't call this my "great drawings" book - my illustrations are terrible . . .
Anyway, I love the convenience of this idea. Easy for me - a breeze for the kids. You could have different products depending on what you normally use for sun protection (45 vs. 15 SPF). You get in the shower, get wet and are instantly protected for the day.
So, what are the negatives? Well, if your kids shower like mine do, you have to stand next to their shower prompting them to turn off the water (and make sure they actually have washed their hair). So this means a lot of the sunscreen goes down the drain - a waste. So we could add a meter to the product so that the sunscreen only mixes with the water when you are ready.
Also, can you really get good protection from something that washes over you? Can you really get 45 SPF or would it really be more like 8? If this was only for light sun protection, would anyone buy it?
Finally, you'd have to make sure that you could create a "no tears" formula or else the earth would ring with the sound of this product hitting trash cans around the world.
And then I thought, how else could this idea be utilized in the shower? In my drawing above I included a bottle of Vitamin E or aloe/lanolin and garden/herb smells. What do you think?
How about a vote? Add a comment to tell me how you'd improve this idea or, if so inclined, where you'd bury it.
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