The ABDL Shop Carousel Diaper Advanced Review

Fruitkitty

Est. Contributor
Messages
697
Role
  1. Diaper Lover
  2. Diaperfur
The Carousel Diaper is the first diaper from The ABDL Shop, a company that launched around the beginning of 2017. They have variously sold this diaper, pacifiers, and onesies. The Carousel diaper has been in and out of stock over 2017.

I am reviewing the medium size which I purchased in January 2018, which they now sell via Amazon in single packs. This version differs visibly from early versions and advertisements in that it now has a yellow wetness indicator and more wrinkled appearance of the backsheet, suggesting that the manufacturing process has changed. The medium is listed as fitting waists of 30"-40" and the large is listed as fitting waists of 38"-50".



Appearance, Size, and Features

The ABDL Shop Carousel Diaper has packaging with partial printed side panels in an otherwise transparent bag. The print has hand-drawn images of the same carousel animals used in the diaper print, the logo, and block lettering all in pastel colors.

284-11-packfront.JPG


284-12-packside.JPG



The ABDL Shop Carousel Diaper is mostly all-white design but with baby blue and baby pink waves on the sides and a printed landing zone. The landing zone print is a full-panel image of a carousel in baby blue, baby pink, and purple that appears to be a combination of those two colors. The print has "The ABDL Shop" logo underneath the carousel.

The print strikes me as being somewhat analogous in to the Bambino Classico print in that it's sort of "pseudo-babyish" – a print that hams up babyish tropes but which has elements that wouldn't be seen on an actual baby diaper. Here, the fact that the diaper prominently spells out "ABDL" gives away the game. The current version also adds a yellow wetness indicator, which was not on the original version and creates a large break from the baby diaper aesthetic.

The outer plastic has a slick, oily feel to it.

284-1-FrontFolded.JPG


284-2-BackFolded.JPG


Front and Back of Folded Diaper, Respectively


To test their dry thickness, I stacked three diapers on top of each other, placed a heavy book on top of them, and measured their height. Together, the 3 diapers had a height of approximately 9.3 cm (3.7 in). Thus, the dry thickness of a single folded diaper is 3.1 cm (1.2 in).

284-3-stacked.JPG


3 Diapers Stacked

The ABDL Shop Carousel Diaper uses a double-tape design with white tapes that measure 4.1 cm (1.6 in) wide each.

284-4-tapes.JPG


The Tapes


The inside of the diaper is all white and the padding is arranged in an hourglass shape. The padding feels soft and cottony. The diaper has standing leak guards and features elastic waistbands in both front and back.

284-5-outside.JPG


284-6-inside.JPG


Front and Back of Unfolded Diaper


With the diaper outstretched, it measures 76.3 cm (30.0 in) in length, 64.2 cm (25.3 in) in width at the wings, 30.3 cm (11.9 in) in width at the center, and 22.5 cm (8.9 in) in width between the leak guards.

284-7-length.JPG


284-8-widthwing.JPG


284-9-widthcenter.JPG




Performance and Fit

To test the capacity of this diaper quantitatively, I performed two tests.

First, I weighed a diaper and put it on. I then repeatedly dosed water into the front of it in 100 mL increments using a metered laboratory bottletop dispenser, followed by sitting down in a chair for 30 seconds each time to give the diaper a chance to absorb the liquid, then checking for leaks. When a leak occurred, I weighed the diaper again, and recorded the change in weight.

Over 3 replicates of this H2O capacity test, the ABDL Shop Carousel Diaper averaged 2192 mL with a standard deviation of 164 mL.

During one trial of this test, I recorded qualitative information about the diaper as I added water to it. After 700 mL of water, the front of the diaper felt constantly wet and region above the wetness indicator looked visibly saturated. At 800 mL, the diaper felt wet at the top of my legs. At 900 mL it was hard to put my legs together because the diaper seemed to be expanding first very widely at the top. At 1300 mL I noted that the front had been continuing to expand but still relatively little had flowed further down into the diaper. At 1500 mL I felt like I was sitting in the edge of a puddle. At 1700 mL, I felt like I was sitting fully in a puddle. At 1800 mL I felt liquid flowing next to my legs. At 2000 mL, the diaper leaked.

I folded the diaper back up to compare its thickness to a dry diaper. It had expanded to roughly 10.1 cm (4.0 in), about 3.3x its original size. The tapes did not meaningfully move during this test.

284-10-heightfull.JPG


Dry Diaper Next to Full Diaper After Quantitative Test

I then performed a second test in which I made normal saline (0.9% NaCl in H2O), weighed a diaper and put it on, then used a metered laboratory bottletop dispenser to dose 160 mL saline every 5 minutes until it leaked, sitting down between increments. I weighed the diaper afterwards and divided the resulting change in grams by 1.0046 to account for the density of saline to determine the change in milliliters. 160 mL is approximately equivalent to half of an average adult urine void, and this increment is loosely representative of a "half-flood".

Over 3 replicates of this saline capacity test, the ABDL Shop Carousel Diaper averaged 959 mL with a standard deviation of 11 mL. Rounded to numbers of integer "half-flood" doses, the diaper averaged 6.0 "half-floods" with a standard deviation of 0.0 "half-floods".

The average dry mass of this diaper, based on 6 replicates across both tests, was 203.2 g with a standard deviation of 4.0 g.

I weighed and put on a fresh diaper and wore it while going about ordinary activities. The diaper lasted a total of 6 hours before beginning to leak. During my test, I had 4 wettings and including 2 floods. I weighed the diaper afterwards and recorded a change of 999 g or about 6.2 "half-floods", consistent with my test results.

With a 36" waist, I am in the middle of the listed size range for the medium Carousel Diaper. I normally wear size medium in other diaper brands. This diaper seemed to fit my size well. The tapes slid a bit but did not pop in my testing.


Price and Final Thoughts

I bought a pack of these diapers for the purposes of a review from https://www.amazon.com/ using the link provided at https://www.theabdlcompany.com/. They are available in only in single 10 packs at $35.99, and qualify for Amazon Prime shipping.

This works out to $3.60/diaper and based on my test results this diaper holds 1.7 "half-floods" per dollar. This price makes them very expensive and inefficient compared to other ABDL diapers. More than anything, this diaper is poor deal because the lack of case pricing leads to a very high price per diaper. They have decent performance, above that of ABDL diapers marketed as "daytime diapers" and substantially better than some other brands with single products, but there's still some work to do before I would call this a particularly competitive product. The odd addition of a wetness indicator on this run seems to underscore that this is still a work in progress.

If you're looking in particular for a pastel babyish full landing zone print, this diaper does fit a niche and performs reasonably as a diaper. However, the limitation to single packs and the resulting high prices means that you will pay a large premium to get this exact flavor of print.
 
Last edited:
An interesting thought: Pampers and Huggies are now featuring a wetness indicator on their diapers, just like these have. So in that regard, the Carousels are somewhat authentic. But I agree, the "ABDL" is a give away.
 
Back
Top