what adult diapers were available in the 80's-90's

[scaifester]

I am trying to think back to the 80's and 90's about the diapers that were available then.

I started with depends then tranquility and its a bit of a blur until the 2000's with bambinos then northshore. 

Were bambinos or other abdl diapers available in the 90's

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

Carolyn's Kids, Edley Enterprises, DPF and some medical companies that I did not get

[username]

Middle/late 1990's Tena Slips were available in the U.K. So were Attends and Molicare. I wore Tena Slips from 1997 to 2003 when I was a teenager every night not due to IC but child psychologist told my foster parents I had attachment disorder from being a abused child so they were a comfort to me. My foster parents let me wear every night from 11 to 17.  

[Crinklz Kat]

Attends --- the "benchmark" at the time. Yet by today's standards are utter garbage.   No matter... I'd love to have some right now!  Plus the crappy even by past standards Depends, Tranquility, and Promise (which would later become Tena).  But that about wraps up what was "retail" (in the US that is).   Back then the vast majority was institutional production.

[dlinmsp]

Anyone remember Ambeze?

[Glennie]

even back into the 60ies sear sold adult diapers out of the catalog. adults have needed diapers since the dawn of time . It amazing me just how delicate having bladder and bowel control real is

 

[Crinklz Kat]

1 hour ago, dlinmsp said:

Anyone remember Ambeze?

Vaguely.

[willnotwill]

The first disposable diapers for adults hit around 1979 or so if I recall correctly.  These were the straight sided, single-taped affairs (like the 60's pampers).   The first ones I had were the Medalist brand (sold by Sears, though I got my first box at the drug store at the Hopkins hosplital in Baltimore).   My favorite brand was one called Ambeze, but there were lots of minor brands back then.    I liked the name "Go Aheads" (which I think were baby blue).    I spend a lot of time hunting through med supply stores looking for different ones.   Curity ended up being a popular brand with one big tape set lower on the brief (not to my liking).

Attends came out in 1981 and was the earliest hourglass shaped diaper to my knowledge.   By a few years it was near impossible to find the rectangualr kind (though Kendall carried them for a long time in their line).    There was a brand called Dry Control or something like that which perhaps was the most crinkly diaper I ever had, it was just plain stiff.    Depend followed not too long after and quickly changed to that institutional green color they used for a long time.   Attends disappeared from retail after a PG sold them.

HDIS came into being in the late eighties and was a pretty good resource for a long time along with a few other similar medical suppliers like DMP.   Of course DOMTAR bought both HDIS and Attends and proceeded to ruin both companies.  You'd never know HDIS was an incontinence product company from looking at their catalog now.   They primarily exist to redirect Medicaid clients to their Reassure house brand which maximizes their profits.

SO yes, I remember Ambeze.  They were made by Whitestone products that had a facility near where I lived in NJ.   They actually had an outlet store in the building, but all they seemed to stock when I went in there once was infant products.

[rusty pins]

6 hours ago, dlinmsp said:

Anyone remember Ambeze?

Yeah, super thin, only one tape per side.  Better off wearing a single layer paper towel. 

Depends and Attends were the first in the very late 1970's, then store brands started showing up like Hooks and Walgreens.  Still only available from drug stores and maybe K-Mart had the Depends which were belted undergarments.  They came with 2 elastic bands with a button on each end.  The undergarment was a uniformly shaped strip that had button holes at the top front and back on each side.  You buttoned the elastic strips to each side and that was what held them in place.  Later on they added tapes and became more like diapers.  Attends were like diapers from the start with 6 tapes, 3 per side and they came in a box instead of a plastic package.  The inner lining was made of textured plastic that felt like sandpaper and they called it a micro pore lining.  The genius that came up with that idea should have been shot!  No SAP back then and they clumped terribly when wet, but that was all we had back then.

[willnotwill]

Sorry, Depend and Attends were not the first.   There were disposable liners for plastic pants going back into the 60's.    There were rectangular SAP diapers before Attends hit the market.

[dyperbole]

May have been a shitload of disposable diapers before Depend and Attends, but there was no way for me to find out about them as a young adult.  No Internet, no adverts, not even any indication that there were adults that wore diapers.  Hell, I worked next to a medical supply place, and they didn't give any indications that they sold diapers.  Even when I went into it years after working next to it, the adult diapers they had inside were pretty much the same ones I could find in stores by that time.

Looking at my local newspaper archive, the first ad for Attends was in 1983, and the first ad for Depend was in 1984.  Doesn't really matter when they came out if they weren't available in stores and advertised. so the first time I saw disposable adult diapers was in the mid 80s.

Same for adult cloth diapers.  The first adult cloth diaper I ever saw was when I started looking for diapers at medical stores.  The diaper was one of the ugliest things I ever saw.  It had a rectangular rubber protector sewn into it in the crotch area.  It snapped on and had elastic in the front.  They were just fugly as hell, but I bought a couple.  Wore them once or twice and tossed them because they didn't do it for me.  

Thank goodness for DPF.  Didn't find them until the late 80s, and they were the first place that I ever found proper adult diapers and Gerber style plastic panties. Still have one cloth DPF diaper I purchased in the early 90s.

[rusty pins]

Technically, there were disposable diapers prior to Attends and Depends but you could hardly call them diapers.  More like a bed pad with plastic backing and maybe a couple tapes added.  Mostly in old drug stores and really off unknown brands.  Not at all like Attends and Depends when they came out and hit the market in drug stores and some large box stores in the late 1970's.  Attends and Depends were like Pampers in the fact that they marketed and advertised in magazines and even on TV.  Pampers were not the first disposable baby diaper either although people think of them as such.  What you could get going back to the 1940's were cheap paper like baby disposable diapers that parents could get by order through some drug stores (not stocked on shelves like the Pampers, LUVS and Huggies of today), mostly for parents taking vacation trips and not wanting to haul loads of wet and dirty cloth diapers around.  Just like people think of Pampers as the first disposable baby diapers, we also think of Attends and Depends as the first adult diapers due to their marketing and overall availability.  Sure their may have been some cheap products that were called "Adult Diapers" for the person with incontinence that had to ask in the drug store or order through a catalog or mail order company, just like cheap disposable baby diapers in the 1940's and 1950's, but they could hardly be compared to Attends and Depends in overall design, quality and nation wide availability.

[waynecook52]

On 9/25/2020 at 12:50 PM, willnotwill said:

The first disposable diapers for adults hit around 1979 or so if I recall correctly.  These were the straight sided, single-taped affairs (like the 60's pampers).   The first ones I had were the Medalist brand (sold by Sears, though I got my first box at the drug store at the Hopkins hosplital in Baltimore).   My favorite brand was one called Ambeze, but there were lots of minor brands back then.    I liked the name "Go Aheads" (which I think were baby blue).    I spend a lot of time hunting through med supply stores looking for different ones.   Curity ended up being a popular brand with one big tape set lower on the brief (not to my liking).

Attends came out in 1981 and was the earliest hourglass shaped diaper to my knowledge.   By a few years it was near impossible to find the rectangualr kind (though Kendall carried them for a long time in their line).    There was a brand called Dry Control or something like that which perhaps was the most crinkly diaper I ever had, it was just plain stiff.    Depend followed not too long after and quickly changed to that institutional green color they used for a long time.   Attends disappeared from retail after a PG sold them.

HDIS came into being in the late eighties and was a pretty good resource for a long time along with a few other similar medical suppliers like DMP.   Of course DOMTAR bought both HDIS and Attends and proceeded to ruin both companies.  You'd never know HDIS was an incontinence product company from looking at their catalog now.   They primarily exist to redirect Medicaid clients to their Reassure house brand which maximizes their profits.

SO yes, I remember Ambeze.  They were made by Whitestone products that had a facility near where I lived in NJ.   They actually had an outlet store in the building, but all they seemed to stock when I went in there once was infant products.

Willnotwill,the ones you where talking that hat the single  tapes and where flat.On the package it sain one sise fitts all came out in the 60's.

[willnotwill]

They were one size fits all.    

 

[scaifester]

Yes, I still remember the 6 tape green depends fondly. They were the first diapers that I ever wore. 

[ValentinesStuff]

3 hours ago, scaifester said:

Yes, I still remember the 6 tape green depends fondly. They were the first diapers that I ever wore. 

You must have been a big baby.

 

I remember going through the Sunday coupons looking for Depend or Attends coupons.

[oznl]

In Australia, the retail adult disposable nappy landscape in the 1980s was pretty bleak.

We had the dreadful belted Depends pads that @rusty pins was talking about and I tried them.  They did not so much absorb pee as deflect and delay it slightly on its way to your outerwear.  They may have been effective for slight bladder leakage but anything resembling a bladder full would swiftly overwhelm them to the point where they were beyond useless.

  I threw the pack out before finishing it because it was so bad.

There were also “Soft-eze” sold as the “system used by most Australian hospitals”.  These consisted of narrow, rectangular pads that could be inserted into a reusable, partially-waterproof over-pant.   Unlike the Depends, they didn’t fall off when wet but the absorbency was again limited by both outright capacity and the coverage area of the narrow pad.  They could be peed in very, very carefully.  They may have worked better with female anatomy but that’s just a guess.

I'm guessing that those Australia hospitals back then must have been changing the bedding multiple times per day or, used some of the cloth institutional products that were available.

1980s disposables were so bad that during most of the 1990s, I couldn’t tell you what kind of disposables were available as I’d abandoned them completely in favour of cloth for my episodic diapering.

I can dimly recall trying some “Attends” whilst in the USA in the mid-1990s, again an underwhelming experience.

I didn’t seriously revisit disposables until I eventually went 24/7 and needed to rely on disposables for practicality.  Today's are still not 100% great today in my opinion but they are light years in front of what was available 30 years ago.

[wetatnight 2]

The main one in stores were Depends and Attends and a few pharmacy brands

also at one time Sears catalogs offered youth and adult diapers but I don't know who made them or what the quality was like

 

[willnotwill]

The main one in stores were Depends and Attends and a few pharmacy brands

Attends dried up in retail in 1999 when P&G sold the brand and the acquiring company decided to sell through healthcare  channels.    There were very few "pharmacy" brands but there were a few other medical supply companies making their own brands (as mentioned in threads above).   There was Ambeze and a company called Medical Disposables to name a few.

also at one time Sears catalogs offered youth and adult diapers but I don't know who made them or what the quality was like

As I stated above, the first Sears disposable offering (in the Big Book at least) was in Spring 1977.   The following picture is from the Fall 1977 book (better picture/description).    This was the "Sears' Best" brief but the exact same diaper was sold elsewhere under the Medalist brand.

It indeed was the first disposable I wore.

Attends were introduced in the catalog in the Fall 1981 edition.

[willnotwill]

In the Fall 1983 catalog, Depend belted undergarments make their first appearance:

In 1984 they added their own SAP three-tape hourglass brief

 

By 1986, Attends and Depends were gone from the catalog leaving only the house brand brief above.

By 1987 they had removed all medical stuff from the "Big Book" in favor of the health care specialog.

 

[Crinklz Kat]

On 9/26/2020 at 10:24 PM, waynecook52 said:

Willnotwill,the ones you where talking that hat the single  tapes and where flat.On the package it sain one sise fitts all came out in the 60's.

 

On 9/27/2020 at 10:24 AM, willnotwill said:

They were one size fits all.    

 

More like one size fits none!

[babypb]

On 9/25/2020 at 12:50 PM, willnotwill said:

The first disposable diapers for adults hit around 1979 or so if I recall correctly.  These were the straight sided, single-taped affairs (like the 60's pampers).   The first ones I had were the Medalist brand (sold by Sears, though I got my first box at the drug store at the Hopkins hosplital in Baltimore).   My favorite brand was one called Ambeze, but there were lots of minor brands back then.    I liked the name "Go Aheads" (which I think were baby blue).    I spend a lot of time hunting through med supply stores looking for different ones.   Curity ended up being a popular brand with one big tape set lower on the brief (not to my liking).

...yes, I too loved those "Ambeeze". Have mentioned those several times in various threads here. Thin, all white, no wetness indicator, one tape per side. I even remember the white packaging also said "Up to 40" waist", but back then I was a 36" and didn't know how they'd ever fit a 40" waist as they seemed kinda smallish on me, kinda bikini like I guess. I used to put three or four at a time on myself and also used that clear 3" wide packaging tape to help them stay fastened. On the package it also used to say "DIAPER STYLE". Had one older lady clerk say to me, "Wouldn't you rather have more of a brief style than these? These will look just like you're wearing baby diapers." I'm thinking, uh, that's kinda the point lady!!!!! LOL, LOL!!!

[willnotwill]

I kept buying those rectangular style diapers for as long as they were available.    These were the Pampers of my youth (well, not my youth, I was in cloth diapers, but I remember my brother, six years younger having them).    Function wasn't as important as being the correct form factor.

I might have switched to the hourglass design a little sooner if Attends had been a bit closer to the design of the current baby diapers.

 

 

[ValentinesStuff]

These? 

https://www.blowoutmedical.com/kendall-ables-adult-brief-with-flat-fold-design.html?utm_source=google&utm_medium=base&utm_campaign=products&feed_special=google&gclid=Cj0KCQjwtsv7BRCmARIsANu-CQcfJ32pOcdecHP8IZE98cXfAtfUnfFSkHimJw7VarYJfIS7kvbzGYAaAkXkEALw_wcB

[willnotwill]

Yep, I bought more than a few Kendells.   They're the last of what used to be the standard in the industry.