Best bandage adhesive (brand) and baby oil (brand) combo for bandage covering the eyebrow?

Question

I'm about to apply a bandage that will cover my eyebrow and read on this site it'd be best to use a certain brand of adhesive tape and then a brand of baby oil to make the removal less painful.

I opened-up a gash 1/2" above 1/2 length of my right eyebrow. 3 stitches in the ER closed the wound.

In a few days, I am having a competent friend remove them. I can choose the brand of the bandage to apply to the wound after removal. Since the adhesive will cover my eyebrow I want to choose something that will be easy on my eyebrow when it is time for remove. I might have permanently lost 1/4 of the eyebrow if that makes a difference. It's a mess up there. But my vision is not affected.

I read on this site to apply baby oil before removing the adhesive. But it seemed like the combination of the brand of bandage used and brand of baby oil used mattered? My stitches are coming out and the adhesive bandage is going on my eyebrow this weekend. What brand should I use? Then, when the time comes to remove the bandage, what brand of baby oil should I use?

Right now, I need all the help I can get.

Answer 1

We don't recommend products here, but my hack is:

You have a few days to experiment with different types of bandage and oil, on some other part of your body, to find out which combination is most easily removed.

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Edit

The question suggests you might be thinking of using a plaster like in the left picture:

Thinking outside the box, you can keep adhesive away from the wound by applying a sterilised gauze bandage held in place with

• a band like the centre picture

• surgical tape like the right picture

I could not find a more exact pictures, they are just to illustrate the methods.

Answer 2

Baby oil is very much a uniform product across brands -- light mineral oil with scent added. You could use any commercial brand, or mineral oil sold as a laxative, or light machine oil as is used for guns or sewing machines, with effectively the same results except they smell different.

Adhesive bandages come in broadly three classes: cheap, common, and extra-sticky. As noted in another answer, the biggest concern here is that the bandage not stick to the healing wound (you'll need to change the bandage at least two or three times between removing the stitches and full healing).

In general, cheap bandages stick when you don't want them to, come off when you want them to stick, and leave goo behind when they do come off. Extra-sticky bandages, the kind that will stay on a kid when they bathe or swim, are a bad choice here, as you're likely to pull the skin and hair enough to reopen the partially healed wound trying to get the bandage off, baby oil or not, and even if you don't it's extra painful to remove this sort.

That leaves the common sort -- though you'll still have the choice of common and "non-stick" pads; in this case, the non-stick is clearly better. So, you want the common sort of bandage strip with a non-stick pad (and will still have a choice of a couple brands and a store brand generic at most pharmacies). You may also want to practice the baby oil removal technique on uninjured skin before you try the bandage on your actual eyebrow wound -- that way you'll know what to expect.