covid – Created Curated by Sara Brown

Disposable Glove’s Good or Bad?

I talked in my last blog about the damage that frequent, but essential washing can do to your hands. Is a simpler solution to wear disposable gloves, which are often made of latex? I have seen many people at work and in Supermarket’s wearing these one-use gloves. But is this as safe as frequent hand- washing, it could be that wearing gloves can give you a false sense of security. A virus like Covid can adhere well to latex and other types of gloves. Similarly, if someone has touched a contaminated surface with a gloved hand, they are just as likely to transmit contamination as someone who hasn’t worn gloves. Failing to change gloves when needed is no different from failing to wash your hands. If you handle something contaminated with coronavirus and then touch your face, the gloves won’t stop you from getting infected. Wearing gloves is a convenient way to minimise contamination and keep our hands clean, but they are only really useful when hand-washing is either not possible or insufficient to prevent chemical or biological contamination. And if they are worn, will need to be changed as often as hands need to be washed.

Most gloves that come in large packs are not sterile. When you see someone wearing gloves in a food preparation or retail environment, they may have had them on for hours and might have also handled contaminated material with them. Not taking off gloves correctly can contaminate your hands. You need to reach inside your right glove and peel it inside out without touching the outside. Watch a few episodes of Gray’s Anatomy or ER to see how It’s done!

Some people develop an allergy to gloves made of natural rubber latex. Choose non-latex gloves unless there are no alternatives that give the required protection. Alternatives such as soft nitrile, vinyl or plastic gloves may provide better chemical resistance or durability. If you must use latex, choose low-protein, powder-free gloves. Gloves should always fit the wearer. Tight gloves can make hands feel tired and lose their grip. Gloves that are too large, can create folds, these can impair work and be uncomfortable. Our hands have a natural reaction to a tight, hot environment, which leads to sweating. This can make wearing gloves uncomfortable and even lead to skin problems that make the issue worse. When skin is exposed to sweat for a prolonged time, it weakens and becomes more vulnerable. Also, a moist environment is the perfect breeding ground for bacteria and fungus. So, although gloves are a necessary precaution without taking steps to reduce sweat build-up, they can become a health issue.

Standard single-use gloves provide a non-permeable barrier that safely protects the hands in light duty work environments. But a lack of airflow inhibits proper regulation of the skin environment and glove friction from repeatedly rubbing against the skin harms the upper skin layers. Over time, the health risks for workers from uncomfortable single-use gloves can greatly decrease productivity as well increase the risk of significant medical issues. By limiting hand functionality, perspiration may hinder someone’s ability to perform certain job functions. Repeatedly alternating from a wet to dry environment, like putting on and removing several pairs of gloves a day, exacerbates irritation to the skin. (Just ask nurses what they think about this!) It doesn’t get any better when gloves are removed as the compromised skin is then exposed to a fluctuaton in temperature. Skin irritations such as dryness, chapping and cracking, can lead to more serious conditions.

Chronic contact dermatitis, is one of the most commonly reported occupational diseases. Dermatitis can be caused by direct contact with the natural latex rubber in latex gloves. Powdered latex gloves can also cause asthma. The proteins in the latex glove leach into the powder which becomes airborne when they are removed. Inhaling the powder may lead to sensitisation.

This all sounds a little alarming but if you have to or want to wear gloves, there are some moisture management techniques that can help. Using an emollient or hand creams that adds an additional layer of protection between glove moisture and the skin and frequently changing your gloves so as to limit exposure to prolonged moisture. Newer technologies within a glove are making the wearing experience more comfortable. One such technology incorporates an absorbent liner that wicks moisture from the skin. Additionally, therapeutic properties and protective ingredients are being manufactured into a glove, which can limit the potential for skin irritation and provide a healthier environment for the hand.

Been aware of taking care of your hands safely and keeping them clean, dry and well-moisturised will make a big difference. And not just sticking on a pair of gloves and forgetting about them. Many one-use gloves are now fully recyclable and opt for these if you can.

Look after your hands they work hand on your behalf and deserve to be treatedwith love and care.

Looking After Your Hands

Beauty and Bathing

Our hands play an important role in our lives. We use them when expressing ourselves, to show our affection for the ones we love, and even put them through the stress and hard work of daily chores. Hands are a vital tool that we should definitely take better care of. Now, more than ever, our hands need both protection and pampering.

Every time you wash your hands, the skin is stripped of its natural oils. Excessive hand -washing can quickly leave you with very dry hands. So, the recent extra hand-washing has played havoc on our long-suffering hands. The COVID-19 pandemic has sparked a great deal of interest in how people might avoid getting infected. One of the methods public health officials strongly encourage is hand-washing. We are all very adept at washing our hands thoroughly. But this repeatedly cleaning with soap and water and then using an alcohol-based hand sanitiser (at least 60% alcohol to be effective) can lead to damaged skin and soreness. It’s also worth mentioning that wearing one-use gloves on a daily bases can cause problems, as latex gloves can result in allergic reactions and irritation. (I am writing an additional blog post about this as we speak)

Frequent hand-washing can lead to Irritant Contact Dermatitis. This presents as dry, sore, itchy or red skin on the hands. This isn’t an allergy, but an irritative effect of the soaps been used. Looking after your hands is important, to keep them healthy and free from infection. The most important step is applying a moisturiser (emollient) to the hands regularly. Ideally, every time you wash your hands, use a hand cream or lotion afterwards. Often people have a hand cream but simply do not use it frequently enough, to get its full benefits. Daily activities do dry out the skin on your hands so moisturising will give back much needed hydration.

Very dry hands that are rough and cracked need a lot more care and attention If you have severely dry hands this might also mean you’re dehydrated. Contact your doctor if your hands become infected. A great tip to get an overnight miracle hand treatment is to rub in a thick layer of hand lotion or cream and pull on a pair of light cotton gloves. Simply leave them on throughout the night and you will wake up with lovely, soft, moisturised hands. (It works for the feet too using socks of course!)

Here are a few easy tips in caring for your hands;

Avoid exposure to extremely hot water and use warm water to wash your hands.

Wear gloves for washing up and gardening, to help protect hands and nails from dehydration and damage.

Protect your hands when using chemicals such as cleaning products and wear rubber gloves.

Apply the cream or lotion to the backs of the hands first and rub together before smoothing any excess onto the palms. The backs of your hands need more moisturisation.

Massage your hands, regularly, which is very stress-relieving and helps to release any pain in your hands. Good for arthritis sufferers.

Use mild and gentle soap when washing your hands and natural hand lotions and creams.

Wear sunscreen on your hands. This is easy to forget to do. Your hands show as much age damage as your face.

On a final note, often we don’t stop to consider the impact of cleaning products on our skin. These remove grime, limescale and dirt, but they also do the same to skin cells. The chemicals in toilet cleaners are some of the most abrasive. Chlorine combined with acid can form a toxic chlorine gas, which can cause severe burns on the skin. So, (as your grandmother swore by) always wear a pair of rubber gloves. Washing your dishes in piping hot water is essential to remove dirt and kill off lingering germs. However, this hot water is uncomfortable and bad for your skin.

The most well-known brand (launched in1950) and the best, I’ve tried is Marigold, good sturdy high-quality gloves that last for months, these are now latex- free and recyclable. (even the disposable glove range) They have teamed up with Teracycle®, a global leader in recycling hard-to-recycle waste. Which is one more reason to buy this product.

So, it’s not just a nice treat to buy a hand cream but as important as buying a product for your face. And your hands do deserve your gratitude for all they do for you!

Baby Steps to Normal Life

My thoughts

As some elements of our normal life returns to us this week and next week. I think its time to reflect on the last year. Give a huge thank you to the front-line workers who kept everything running whilst placing themselves in harm’s way, to help others. I send a virtual hug to those who lose someone and those still living with long-term health problems. And last but certainly not less, I sent a silent pray to those who are still battling Covid and their loved ones. We have to remember the bad times to hopefully learn from them as start to rebuilt a new normal life.

I am not sure that things will ever be quite the same, perhaps that’s not such a bad thing if the new normal is an improvement on the old normal. I guess that is left in all of our carefully washed hands. With a renewed sense of what matters the most: family, health and community.

We still need to proceed with care, the worse hopefully is over, but there still needs to be caution and new awareness. Some of the freedom we took for granted maybe lost for some time. Working together we can do more, a lot of people are stir crazy, some are deeply depressed with good cause, some are anxious to leave the safety of their four walls. Everyone’s story is different and deserves respect. We have all done the best we could do under the circumstances. The blame game achieves nothing!

I have mentioned this before but if you are offered a vaccination please take it, if not for yourself but for the others in your life to protect them. Its one of the few things available to us to fight this silent virus.

I wish you all a safe journey moving forward, continue to stay safe and respect the path of others please, we all matter!

Scent in Business

Buisness

I have talked about home scents and the positive ways it can affect you, but it’s not only in your home that this happen’s, shops, restaurants, hotels even banks are catching on to the fact that the importance of scents does not only apply to the home interior market. Scent makes it easier to build authentic, emotional connections with customers, as humans are most receptive when all 5 senses are active. Most businesses only use sight and sound to communicate with customers. Ambient scent uses fragrance to enhance the experience of consumers. Scent branding is unique to each company’s identity. Researchers around the globe have conducted field studies on the effects of ambient scent and there is much research on emotion and scent marketing. The research clearly shows scent has the power to affect our emotional state. But what does that mean in the context of a business?

In the wake of the Ecommerce boom, customer expectations have changed and customers seek unique (emotional) experiences. The Harvard Business Review found that emotionally connected customers are 52% more valuable to a brand than those who are just satisfied. According to branding expert and author Martin Lindstrom, of all the senses, smell is the most persuasive.

When it comes to the retail sector, scents can play a major role in affecting consumers’ purchasing habits and determining whether their in-store experience is one that will be repeated or not. Although some retail store owners will argue that they like to concentrate on visual elements, ambient scenting offers a number of proven benefits to retailers. Customers browse longer in stores where pleasant fragrances are diffused, increasing the chances of a purchase. Also, when offering an inviting environment the shopping experience becomes memorable and the shopper’s perspective of the store is affected positively.

In more recent years, companies have begun to recognize the power of scent. Fashion companies have learned to capitalize on how a particular scent can help customers form an emotional attachment to their brand. And it’s become a common strategy for big companies to take full advantage of sensory design by scenting their spaces with aromas that represent their brand and appeal directly to their target market. Abercrombie & Fitch has their own men’s fragrances, Fierce, which is scented throughout the stores as a way to support the company’s character, giving off what they would describe as a confidence, bold and masculine lifestyle.

Eric Spangenberg, a consumer psychologist and academic found that once feminine scents like vanilla were released, women’s sales doubled. Similar were the effects on men when more masculine smells were released. According to Spangenberg, “Men don’t like to stick around when it smells feminine, and women don’t linger in a store if it smells masculine.”

Switching the scents during the day can also change the mood, in the morning using invigorating scents like citrus and peppermint scents give a different energy to a space. By changing to a calming scent, later in the day or evening the energy will alter too. The company, At-Aroma, which specializes in scent, uses the elements of essential oils to develop its fragrances, in particular its Supplement Air series. Blends like For Wake Up (with peppermint and lemon) and For Meditation (with cypress and eucalyptus) are intended to aid the mind and body in particular activities.

Certain essential oils like eucalyptus and tea tree are also valued for their antiviral properties. However, while some manufacturers have noted growing demand for essential oils amidst the coronavirus pandemic, industry experts warn that it’s impossible to make any claims about essential oils’ efficacy against COVID-19. However, when I worked for a company selling essential oils, we always sprayed a blend of eucalyptus and tea tree during the flu scents in our shops and it did appear to stop the staff members getting colds and flu as frequently. With global attention on health and sanitation, many businesses are enhancing their cleaning practices with fresh room fragrances to meet higher customer expectations of cleanliness. I feel this will be an area of major growth in the coming years. People don’t always look for the signs of clean, they often smell for them, I know I do.

Scents are such an important part of a consumer’s experience that there are firms which specialize specifically in scent marketing. Scent Air has helped industry worldwide to create powerful customer experiences using fragrance for 20 years, by offering a science-backed approach to custom fragrances (scent branding) and to scenting spaces. They use a wide selection of scent machines and systems to diffuse non-toxic fragrance that has proofed to be successful.

Consumers are craving rich experiences and emotional connections from the businesses they use. In fact, businesses that deliver exceptional experiences can grow twice as fast. It’s not just shops, restaurants and hotels can create a feel of cosiness, luxury and even exhilaration through scent. Researchers tested the ability of ambient scent to create a positive first impression in a hotel. The results found that a fragrance matching a hotel’s brand identity generates a more favourable view from guests including higher perceptions of comfort cleanliness and even food tasting better.

So, I feel that we will be finding more and more businesses in particular post-covid looking to ambient scent to offer their customers that little extra. Particularly when people get their sense of smell back!

The New Normal- Working from Home

Buisness, Lifestyle

Working from home was seen as a temporary fix for an unusual situation. However, this has become a longer necessity than was originally thought. Many people had hoped to return to their offices and initially this was been encouraged by our government, but there appears to have been several U-turns on this policy. Most of the people I know who have been working from home, started doing so in March and in October are still working from home. (And they all really enjoy doing so) Localized lock-downs and Track and Trace, are keeping many of us in our homes.

The majority of office workers believe they will still be working from home until at least 2021 even with the government’s best efforts to get people back into the workplace. More than four out of 10 office workers are still working from their homes. This is despite around half of the respondents, 49 % stating their employer had requested that they return to the office. It shows businesses and the Government still have their work cut out to convince employees that it is safe to return to the workplace. A major obstacle for people going back to work is public transport, with the survey revealing that 57% believing it is unsafe to take the bus or train to work.

Many major companies continue working remotely and plenty have no immediate plans to return to the office. Indeed, and Google have extended their work-from-home policies by an entire year. Employees don’t have to return to their offices until summer 2021, and both companies plan to accommodate remote-working indefinitely in some capacity. Uber, American Express and Airbnb have also extended their remote- working policies.

The Understanding Society Covid-19 Study has stated that nine out of 10 those who had worked from home during lockdown would like to continue in some form. The increasing costs of public transport and overcrowded roads and trains have made getting to work, expensive and stressful. If you spend your working life at a computer or using a telephone, in therapy, could you do this anywhere? Are people much happier and engaged without the stress of commuting? We had even started to see a dramatic reduction in traffic, congestion, and pollution. The benefits to the environmental impacts us all.

Industry insiders estimate that we will see 25-30% of the workforce working at home on a multiple-days-a-week basis by the end of 2021, in both the UK and USA. In the last few decades, the demand for flexibility in where and how people work has been building. Before the crisis, surveys repeated showed 80% of employees want to work from home at least some of the time. Over a third would take a pay cut in exchange for the option.

Its not just workers who can see the benefits of remote- working. Businesses desperate to shed costs could save money, occupancy studies have shown just how inefficiently office space was being used. Employees around the globe are not at their desk 50% to 60% of the time!

Covid-19 will also likely cause executives to rethink the need for travelling to meetings. Whilst virtual meetings may not have all the same benefits of being face-to-face, the savings may outweigh the costs much of the time. Zoom meetings are now very much part of so everyday life.

In Wales, their Governments polices differ from the English Government. Nearly a third of people should still be working from homes, even when coronavirus restrictions have eased, says the Welsh Ministers. Who aim to see about 30% of the workforce in Wales staying at or near to their homes in the long term, adopting a culture that supports remote-working. This move is seen as a way of reducing congestion and pollution and improving the work-life balance of the Welsh population.

I can see the good points and bad points of this move, and it will be interesting to see what happens in Scotland, as the UK is divided in its thinking of the best way forward. I think many things will not go back to the old way of doing things, the work-life balance has been lacking for many of us and having had the time to reflect on this people don’t want, in many cases, to return to the old ways. Not going out and seeing other people could potentially cause mental problems for workers isolated from their colleagues. There are social aspects to working with other people. Seeing and talking to others is vital to our well-being.

Other businesses in the high street, in particular coffee shops, are been badly affected by people not going out to work and not consuming as much. So, I guess this has to be addressed too. Its very sad that many businesses are having to close. In a changing culture, there will always be winners and losers.

Working from home permanently, would also require some re-organisation and adjustments in having an actual work space and not allowing your kitchen, living room or bedroom to become an office 24/7. A work environment which is over-cluttered can drain your energy and one which is well- planned can boost energy levels. An environment is the invisible hand which shapes human behaviour, according to author James Clear. Our homes are now our offices, meeting rooms, school rooms even our gyms. (Vital to our fitness, if we are moving less) As we live, eat, sleep and work from one place and life becomes more virtual. I hope that as our life’s change this is with positively moving onwards to better times.