Product Review: Moon Dough

After the joy then outrage that came after this item appeared in our home, I felt compelled to share our experience with this "Moon Dough."

Honestly, when this item first appeared I had nothing but good thoughts. It's hypoallergenic and it doesn't dry out! How awesome! It also claimed to be easy to clean. I was all aboard. All I keep imagining was my daughter's dried out play-dough or little bits found in the carpet and figured this was a solution...I was sooooo wrong.

*This was after LOTS of kneading & Playing (right before clean up)*

When you first open it you are instructed to knead the dough. It felt neat, really soft, kind of smooth & silky, but really like powder or floury clumps that really don't seem to want to stick together. So as instructed I keep kneading and kneading, over and over again. As you can imagine by the time I gave up on trying to make it look an stick together like a nice lump of dough my daughter was way beyond waiting. What kid doesn't get upset when they get a new toy and have to just sit there and watch mom, who looks like she's having all the fun. Well I finally gave up at let my 4 year old go for it. Let me remind you, this is for 3 & up so I thought we were safe.

Here's the after math:

I felt awful because even with my grandmother and I sitting by the kid this stuff went everywhere. We were watching an trying to help and it just would not work. My daughter was even frustrated, as were we. It was a huge mess and she was even behaving. We never had this kind of problem with our play-dough. It was literally everywhere! It's all so light weight an flaky that it just refused to stay on our table cloth area. The kit came with a place mat, well I was so glad that we still put a table cover under it and protected our whole table, I don't think any bit of it stayed in place. Lots of little flakes EVERYWHERE & Moon Dough stuck inside the toys. They left the ends of these cool stamping toys open so of course she thought she could stamp out holes, we'll clearly it wasn't meant to be used that way. Also digging it out of the tubes was aggravating. Don't get me wrong, the stuff takes form of their molds, but all the extra bits crumble away and because it isn't dough, but more like a silky sand it comes apart as you try to clean or move bits. We really spent more then 5x the effort cleaning and setting it up then actually playing with it. Clearly the work vs reward ratio was way off on this item.

From now on we will be sticking with the dough we all know and love.