Appearance, Size, and Features

Performance and Fit

Price and Final Thoughts

The ABU Lavender, Super Dry Kids (SDK), Cushies, and the Diaper Minister Kiddo by ABU are three different prints of ABU's single-tape diaper. ABUniverse overhauled its single-tape diapers in late 2015 dramatically improving the SDK and Cushies, which are both replica prints of existing older baby diapers. They later added Lavender to their lineup, their take on a more feminine all-over print with wetness indicator and a built-in lavender scent, and the Diaper Minister Kiddo by ABU after partnering with Diaper Minister to produce a new version of that print, which adds an additional waistband in the front. The four prints are sold across 3 different price points.I am reviewing the medium size Lavender, purchased from ABUniverse in January 2018, which was used in all testing data for this review.. The small is listed as fitting waists of 21"-29", medium is listed as fitting waists of 30"-36", the large is listed as fitting waists of 37"-42", and the extra-large is listed as fitting waists of 43"-49".The ABU Lavender has printed packaging similar to other ABU products with printed panels partially filling the front of on other otherwise transparent package. The panel has the logo for Lavender on a background depicting a meadow with lavender flowers.The Kiddo product panel features the image of a fox character wearing the diaper that has been used in most promotional images for the previous Kiddo diaper.The ABU Lavender has an all-over print featuring several flower and star motifs, mostly in shades of purple and pink, two the sides of the wide center. A line of lavender-colored butterflies lines the center as the wetness indicator. Running along the sides is a blue scallop pattern, and the wings of the diaper are a deep lavender color base with darker purple flower patterning. It's a very generically girly pattern. I could imagine it on a generic modern gendered baby diaper, if such a thing exists, but this print is more about asking "What if?" with a modern take than trying to replicate diapers from the much earlier era where they were common.The outer plastic has a slick, rippled, oily feel to it. The diaper is only sold with the scent included, which smells like lavender.The Kiddo print combines an all-over print of teal dots with central teal flowers and a landing zone that has images of cartoon owls in the center with stars and moons in green and blue. It's a fairly basic print, but one that I find to look convincingly like a modern baby print.The Super Dry Kids has a printed front landing zone printed with a repeating pattern of bears with balloons and parachutes. It is based on a late 1990s Pampers Baby Dry design, with a print that is almost identical but with the addition of letters into the image and a change to the printed text. The diaper's outside is white otherwise. To the touch, the plastic cover feels much more substantial as opposed to the pre-2016 version's thin tissue-paper feel.Cushies have a replica print of a generic baby diaper from the mid-2000s. It is an all-over print, with purple sizes, purple outlined icons with smiley faces on the white center, and a landing zone that features colored versions of the icons on an otherwise transparent panel. It's very generically babyish.Both diapers have added the ABU logo to the margins of their repeating patterns.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 9.8 cm (3.9 in). Thus, the dry thickness of a single folded diaper is 3.3 cm (1.3 in).The ABU Lavender, SDK, Cushies, and Kiddo use a single-tape design with single large tapes measuring 7.0 cm (2.8 in) wide each. While other companies have variously experimented with single-tape diapers, only ABU currently makes them. Single-tape designs have difficulty simultaneously keeping a tight seal at the legs and keeping the top of the diaper closed, and this leads to a very idiosyncratic fit on different adult bodies.Partially compensating for the difficult task is a taller than normal waistband, which comes up much higher above the top of the padding. Only on the Kiddo, however, is the front waistband elasticized, which I've found to be greatly helpful in keeping the top from flopping about. All four designs have a back waistband.The inside of these diapers is all-white, and the padding is arranged in an hourglass shape. The padding feels fuzzy, flat, dense, and a bit hard. The diapers have standing leak guards.With the diaper outstretched, it measures 75.3 cm (29.6 in) in length, 66.2 cm (26.1 in) in width at the wings, 29.0 cm (11.4 in) in width at the center, and 20.5 cm (8.1 in) in width between the leak guards.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 ABU Lavender averaged 1603 mL with a standard deviation of 204 mL.During one trial of this test, I recorded qualitative information about the diaper as I added water to it. After 500 mL of water, the front of the diaper felt constantly wet. At 800 mL, I could feel liquid running by my legs. At 1200 mL, I felt like I was sitting at the edge of a puddle. At 1400 mL, I felt like I was sitting in a puddle. At 1500 mL, I could feel liquid moving at my legs. At 1600 mL the diaper leaked on my chair.I folded the diaper back up to compare its thickness to a dry diaper. It had expanded to roughly 9.9 cm (3.9 in), about 3.0x its original size. The tapes did not budge at all throughout this 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 ABU Lavender averaged 701 mL with a standard deviation of 92 mL. Rounded to numbers of integer "half-flood" doses, the diaper averaged 4.3 "half-floods" with a standard deviation of 0.6 "half-floods".The average dry mass of this diaper, based on 6 replicates across both tests, was 181.8 g with a standard deviation of 1.7 g.I weighed and put on a fresh diaper and wore it while going about ordinary activities. The diaper lasted a total of 5 hours before beginning to leak. During my test, I had 2 wettings and 2 floods, and the diaper leaked on the second flood. I recorded a change in mass of 869 g or roughly 5.4 "half-floods", which is at the high end but consistent with my test results.With a 36" waist, I am at the top of listed size range for the medium ABU Lavender. I normally wear size medium in other diaper brands. I have not generally found the ABU single-tape diapers to fit me all that well. In placing the tapes at a height that gives a decent leg seal, I frequently get a floppy front waistband which feels loose and uncomfortable as it gets wet. The Kiddo's front waistband does a lot to help solve this problem, even if it's not a perfect fix, and I really think that the other 3 single-tape diapers would benefit from adding the front waistband.The oversized clear tapes held extremely well in all of my testing and practical wear. One thing that the large single-tapes do very well is stay stuck in place.I bought a pack of the Lavender diapers for the purposes of a review from https://abuniverse.com/ . Without shipping, Lavender is available in single diaper samples for $6.00 (with a $5 discount for a future order for every two sample diapers ordered across brands), 10-diaper packs for $34.99, 40-diaper half-cases for $84.99, and 80-diaper cases at $155.99. Without shipping, Kiddo and Cushies are available in single diaper samples for $6.00 (with a $5 discount for a future order for every two sample diapers ordered across brands), 10-diaper packs for $34.99, 40-diaper half-cases for $82.99, and 80-diaper cases at $142.99. Without shipping, Super Dry Kids is available in single diaper samples for $6.00 (with a $5 discount for a future order for every two sample diapers ordered across brands), 10-diaper packs for $32.99, 40-diaper half-cases for $78.99, and 80-diaper cases at $134.99. ABU no longer includes shipping in its prices, and now adds $1 for samples, $5 for single packs, $8 for half-cases, and $12 for cases, bringing the final case prices to $167.99 for Lavender, $154.99 for Kiddo and Cushies, and $146.99 for Super Dry Kids.They are available in X sizes at X price which does or doesn't including shipping.At the case size, this works out to $2.10/diaper for Lavender, $1.94/diaper for Kiddo and Cushies, and $1.84 for Super Dry Kids. Based on my test results Lavender holds 2.1 "half-floods" per dollar, Kiddo and Cushies hold 2.2 "half-floods" per dollar, and Super Dry Kids holds 2.4 "half-floods" per dollar. These prices are reasonably competitive, though their capacity is among the lower end of the range and thus they are only around the middling at best in efficiency of price for capacity.ABUniverse, is at the time of this writing, the only manufacturer making single-tape diapers. There are good reasons for this in that single-tape designs don't actually make much practical sense for adult diapers because you get some combination of less generally-applicable sizes and poorer leg seals. Making a single-tape adult diaper means making an intentionally inefficient design choice for the sake of replicating the look of baby diapers more closely, and then trying to do the best you can within that limitation. ABUniverse has done a pretty good job given that constraint, as they've made single-tape diapers that do reach into the capacity range of "premium" medical diapers even if they're not at the level of top-end products.Furthermore, if you're going to go so far for authenticity as to a single-tape adult diaper, it's that much more important that your print is authentically babyish. To this end, two of the prints are replicas of actual baby diaper prints and the other two are reasonably believable modern takes on generic baby diaper prints.You do pay a premium to get the single-tape aspect of ABU's single-tape diapers. For the many ABDLs who find this feature to be an important part of what makes an ABDL diaper be an authentic "baby" diaper and those lucky enough to get a good fit with them, this is a relatively modest price premium that's worth paying.