Ever scan the ingredient list of your favorite personal care products like shampoos or lotions and think, what are these complicated chemicals? And are any of them bad for me? We definitely have. And our colleagues at NPR's Life Kit did one step better: They parlayed their anxiety spiral into a helpful guide on the safety of personal care products. So today, Gina talks to Life Kit's Marielle Segarra about some of the top chemicals of concern, including parabens and phthalates.Click here to hear the full Life Kit guide — including how to audit your go-to products.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: What are the concerns about personal care products?
Actually, it's in Section 608C2 of the FD&C Act, as amended under MOCRA, where it defines safe to mean that the cosmetic product, including any ingredient thereof, is not injurious to users under the conditions of use prescribed in the labeling thereof or under such conditions that are customary or usual.
She says to be considered injurious or unsafe, a product would have to cause a serious adverse event. like significant hair loss, persistent rashes, disfigurement, birth defects, inpatient hospitalization, a life-threatening experience, or death. Of course, if you get cancer or if your hormones are going haywire, it's hard to pin that to using a particular product with a particular ingredient.
Emily Barrett is an epidemiologist at the Rutgers School of Public Health.
that's not necessarily something that you're going to detect right away. There's not going to be like an obvious outcome like a rash.
But instead, it might mean that, you know, 20 years from now, you're at greater risk of breast cancer or 20 years from now, your child is going to have fertility problems because the reproductive system developed in just a little bit different way because of the differences in the hormonal environment. So
It's a lot trickier to kind of connect the dots between the exposure and the outcome when you think about chemicals that have like a much kind of longer lag time until the outcome emerges.
Emily says it's especially hard to prove that something is a carcinogen. It's difficult and expensive. And so a lot of the evidence we have on cosmetics comes from animal studies.
Were we to do the definitive studies on this topic, you might want to recruit people really early in life, maybe in childhood or even in utero, because we don't know kind of what the critical periods are sometimes for cancer risk. and follow them for decades and look at their cosmetic use over their entire lifetime and then see who among this cohort develops cancer.
And as you can imagine, that type of study is like impossible to do, right? So the way US research is funded, it usually is in like five year increments and you would have to apply over and over and over Not to mention, like, who wants to sign up for a study that's going to follow them for 60 years? Probably not most people.
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Chapter 2: What historical events led to FDA regulation of cosmetics?
That's Melanie Benesch, an attorney and vice president for government affairs at a nonprofit called the Environmental Working Group. Some chemicals that fall under this fragrance umbrella have been linked to long term health effects. Right. Emily Barrett at Rutgers says phthalates are an example. They're a class of synthetic chemicals and they're in all kinds of products.
Nail polish, hairspray, cleansers, shampoos, lotions, perfumes. The purpose of phthalates is to make plastics more durable. They can also be used as a solvent.
They're just very good at holding on to fragrance and color. So they're kind of like carriers of scent and color in products. Phthalates are known hormone disruptors. So the work that we've done in particular is really looking at phthalate exposure during pregnancy and how that might impact the health of the child.
Like there have been a lot of studies showing a link between high phthalate levels in pregnant women and preterm birth.
Wow. So with all that in mind, like, does Emily have any advice? Definitely.
Probably one of my top recommendations for folks who are looking to potentially reduce their exposure would be to avoid products that have fragrance listed in the ingredients.
So you can either avoid fragrance entirely or you can look for products that say on the label their fragrance is phthalate-free.
Okay, that's helpful. Mariel, next up is takeaway three, right?
Yeah, this one is a roundup of some other ingredients of concern. And a big one is formaldehyde. Ooh, yeah, I bet. Yeah, if you've ever done chemical hair straightening or smoothing at home or at a salon, like a Brazilian blowout service, you have likely been exposed to formaldehyde gas, which is a known carcinogen, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
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