• Nature’s Kiss Chafe-Ease
• £5.85 (45g); £7.95 (90g)
• Active Life Logistics

If you’ve been riding a bike for any time at all, you’ll probably have experienced a degree of shorts-related discomfort at some time or another. Get enough miles in and even the comfiest, best fitting shorts are liable to start chafing somewhere, especially if it’s wet. Unchecked soreness about the nether regions is liable to get infected and then things can get fairly unpleasant. As with so many things, prevention is better than cure and that’s where Chafe-Ease comes in.

Chafe-Ease is a “herbal body lubricant”. It’s a cream containing calendula, tea tree oil, hypericum and lavender as well as other stuff like beeswax and soybean oil. The idea is that it not only acts as a lubricant for areas prone to chafing (and you’ll know which they are…) but also soothes any existing soreness.

We’ve tried it out on some fairly hefty rides, including a solo 12-hour race and the notoriously wet 2004 Saab Salomon Mountain Mayhem and it’s very, very effective. Other testers have noted that shorts they’d given up on as hopelessly uncomfortable become perfectly usable after judicious applications of Chafe-Ease.

The only real drawback is price. What with the natural ingredients and being made on the other side of the world (Nature’s Kiss is based in New Zealand), Chafe-Ease gets quite pricey by the time it reaches the stores in the UK. That said, you don’t have to use very much of it – our 45g tub’s still nearly full.

Positives: Natural ingredients, smells nice, It Just Works™

Negatives: Bit pricey

Verdict: This is great stuff. Short and saddle-related arse abrasions are one of the great unmentionables of cycling, but suffer in silence no more…