The Baby Bottle Grows A Humanlike Nipple To Closely Emulate Breastfeeding
There’s more to mother’s milk than its bespoke formula. As an okay surrogate, though, bottles with plastic nipples are used to feed babies in a pinch. The downside is they’re not perfect to a T, for teet.
Cue Emulait, which has pulled feats even more remarkable than its name. With the help of lactation and infant feeding specialists, the startup has developed a baby’s bottle that closely replicates the natural process of breastfeeding.
The plastic nipple on traditional milk bottles supports the passage of fluid to the baby’s mouth through a simple hole at the top. It’s no boob, however. Real human nipples are textured and firm, not hollow, and Emulait has incorporated these features to make a silicone nipple-on-a-bottle that mimics milk ducts.
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As any feminist would tell you, no two pairs of breasts are alike. Nonetheless, through its research of 1,000 scanned nipples, Emulait has discovered that there are five major nipple shapes. These five are available as options for its bottles, allowing mothers to find one that matches their own.
Available in five skin tones, the silicone nipples are also fleshlike and mimic the softness and porous interior fibers of milk ducts.
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Emulait’s “biomimetic” design doesn’t just replicate the look and feel of a human nipple, but it’s also functionally accurate—down to elasticity and milk flow rate.
Infants being fed on an Emulait bottle will have to engage in active suckling to receive the milk, just as with breastfeeding. As they do this, the nipple stretches, again simulating the nursing process.
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The company posits that its bottles can be used to help babies easily transition from the breast to the bottle, in addition to aiding caretakers who wish to prolong breastfeeding.
Notably, the design could also be game-changing for households who don’t follow the traditional structure of one biological mother and one biological father as primary caregivers. These include same-sex parents, adoptive parents, stepparents, chosen families, babysitters, and nannies.
The Emulait bottle comes in two silhouettes. There’s the ‘Anatomy Bottle’, which is ergonomically shaped like a breast from tip to body so as to create a more comfortable baby-to-breast position and encourage eye contact.
A simpler ‘Classic Bottle’ version is more spherical in shape to accommodate nursing sessions on the go, though it still comes with the all-important nipple.
As outlined by Fast Company, it took the firm nearly six years to perfect its bottles. And at long last, the secondhand milk ducts will be ready for preorders on March 8.
Already, the company has gotten 42,000 interested caregivers on its waitlist, says its co-founder Ben Zeev. While Emulait will start with a small-batch rollout, it intends to mass-produce the bottles come July.
[via Neatorama and Fast Company, images via Emulait]
