Price Tag: $3.39-4.49/30 gloves
Official URL: www.playtexproductsinc.com
Rating:

I’ve never been a big fan of using gloves for dish washing or cleaning. Disposable latex gloves tear easily and tend to end at the wrist which allows water to get inside of them easily. Reusable gloves just always seemed gross to keep around. However, after I had a run-in with one of my son’s toys that gave me a deep gouge in my palm, I decided to give gloves another try.

GreatLengths gloves from Playtex have made me a glove convert. My hand has long since healed, and I’m still using gloves for pretty much every cleaning task. ESPECIALLY for washing dishes.

QUALITY & CONSTRUCTION

The GreatLengths gloves are made of nitrile and are latex free. This makes them okay for people with latex allergies, and it also makes them stronger and more tear-resistant. The gloves are a light blue, and have a slight texture along the exterior that makes them slip-proof, and the interiors are treated to make them easy to take off when you’re ready to dispose of them. Nitrile gloves are commonly used in labs or when dealing with chemicals or “puncture risk” tasks. That should give you an idea for how strong and puncture resistant these gloves are.

COMFORT & FIT

These gloves are “One Size Fits Most” and are comfortable and stretchy with no bagging or sagging around the hand. For my use, the wrist area is a little floppy since I have very slender wrists, but they fit my husband’s average-sized wrists perfectly, and have plenty of stretch to accommodate larger wrists as well. Even with the slight floppiness around the wrist opening, these do not fall down when my hands are extended downwards. The gloves work well for a  wide range of hand sizes.  If you have very short thick fingers, very thin wrists, very thick wrists, or super-sized hands, they might not be a perfect fit.. But we tried them out on all different sized hands at the office, and couldn’t find anyone that they didn’t fit easily. From the hands of a petite 5′2 woman, all the way up to the hands of one of our co-workers who is a 6′6″ giant.

The gloves fit either hand, so you can use them in ones or twos depending on the cleaning task.

Most disposable gloves end near the bony part of your wrist. These extend far beyond that and are a full 4″ longer than the longest disposable gloves that I could find. I have long arms, and they extend nearly halfway to my elbows.

MATERIAL

These gloves are made of Nitrile. The material is thin and allows you to retain a good amount of feeling in your hands and fingertips. Most dish washing gloves seem to cut off the feeling and make it hard to sweep your hands over a surface to find areas that need to be scrubbed more. Surprisingly, despite the thin texture the material does a decent job of blocking heat and allowed me to run the hot water a few degrees hotter than would usually be comfortable.

The material used in these gloves is very stretchy and does not tear easily. I was able to use a single pair for up to a week of heavy dish washing and dispose of them when they began to become discolored.

Nitrile does not biodegrade the way some pure latex gloves do, however Nitrile seems to be linked to a lower risk of allergic reaction than Latex. There are known cases of Nitrile allergy, but they seem to be comparatively rare and the reactions are generally less severe than those caused by Latex.

GOOD FOR

The extra long cuff makes them ideal for washing dishes, where you might have to push your hands into a pot of water, or reach to the bottom of a clogged sink to clear the drain. They’re also wonderful for tasks that you would not want to use reusable gloves for- such as retrieving the toy that your son dropped into the potty after going poo-poos. (Not to save the toy, but to save on the cost of a plumber). Or for cleaning out a clogged drain in search of the ring that your son knocked down the drain… Are we sensing a pattern here?

BOTTOM LINE

These gloves are my favorite disposable gloves for any “dirtier” task or task that requires a longer glove. They are comfortable, affordable, and strong enough to get multiple uses out of a pair.