Burt's Bees Baby Bee Fragrance Free Shampoo and Wash

When it comes to baby shampoo, there’s a huge range of products available, each with different benefits to offer, like easy dispensing or a clean ingredients list. Burt’s Bees Baby Bee Fragrance Free Shampoo and Wash is one of our Today’s Parent Approved picks and a great option to try if you’re looking for a shampoo packed with natural ingredients.

Formulated with soothing aloe and oat flour, this shampoo is 99-percent natural and free of parabens, phthalates, SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate) and petrolatum. A baby’s skin barrier is still developing, which is why many parents are concerned with exposure to chemicals like possible endocrine disruptors (some parabens and phthalates), potential irritants (SLS) and petroleum products (petrolatum—which forms a barrier that doesn't allow moisture to pass through the skin membrane).

Before we dove into assessing the effectiveness of this shampoo, we measured its pH. In case you need a refresher on your high school chemistry, pH is a scale that indicates how acidic or alkaline (or basic) something is, and it happens to be pretty important in skin care—and when you’re washing baby’s hair, you’re washing their scalp, too. The pH of a baby’s skin changes over the days and months after birth, but research suggests that baby wash products should have a pH around 5.5 (up to 7). Products that don’t have a pH around this optimal level might affect baby’s skin barrier, and that could contribute to skin conditions like atopic dermatitis and eczema. In our lab tests, Burt’s Bees Baby Bee Fragrance Free Shampoo and Wash’s pH measured 5.8, right around optimal acidity—good news for your wee one’s tender skin.

Once we established that this shampoo has a good pH for babies, the next step was making sure it does the job it’s supposed to do. In our lab testing, we found this shampoo to be an effective but mild cleanser, and most of our parents agreed, saying it did a good job of removing dirt, excess oils and baby food (yes, even that mashed-in-the-hair dried stuff). Burt’s Bees Baby Bee Fragrance Free Shampoo and Wash has a thicker, gel-like texture that we found makes it easier to dispense from the bottle. Our parent testers found it easy to lather this shampoo to varying degrees (some said it was very easy, while others said it was somewhat easy). On the plus side, none of our testers had trouble keeping this shampoo out of their kid’s eyes and ears while lathering, which isn’t always the case with liquid shampoos. And both our editors and parent testers found that this shampoo rinses easily.

Although the shampoo is fragrance-free, you'll want to have a sniff of this one before you buy because its natural ingredients—namely, honey—give it a scent that lingers on the skin after washing. Most of our family testers didn’t mind this, though.

Ease of use is also really important for any product. Whether you’re a new parent nervously supporting your slippery newborn, or a veteran just trying to keep a grip on your wriggly toddler, dispensing shampoo during bathtime can get a little tricky. Both our editors and parent testers found it really easy to grip a bottle of Burt’s Bees Baby Bee Fragrance Free Shampoo and Wash, even when wet, thanks to the label’s matte finish. Although we had to use a little bit of force to press open the cap, it’s still really easy to do this one-handed. And we like that it’s equally simple to close tightly, without the shampoo making a mess of the bottle.

FINAL WORD

Burt’s Bees Baby Bee Fragrance Free Shampoo and Wash is a gentle, 99-percent natural shampoo that lathers well and is easy to rinse—all the things you want in a baby shampoo. Our parent testers were happy with this baby shampoo, rating its quality, ease of use and value above average overall. Most told us it performs as well as or better than other baby shampoos they’ve used in the past, and all of our parent testers would recommend it to other parents. Given this, it’s no surprise that both our editors and parent testers feel this baby shampoo deserves the Today’s Parent Approved seal.