What's In Your Personal Care Products?

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 https://www.npr.org/lifekit did one step better: They parlayed their anxiety spiral into a helpful guide on the safety of personal care products. So today, Gina https://www.npr.org/people/1082526815/regina-g-barber talks to Life Kit's Marielle Segarra https://www.npr.org/people/1123235730/marielle-segarra about some of the top chemicals of concern, including parabens and phthalates. Click here https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1239050318 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 http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:22Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here with Life Kit host Marielle Sagata. Hey, Marielle.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Hey, Gina.

• 0:27Regina Barber?

  OK, so Marielle, recently on Life Kit, you've been reporting on the safety of personal care products.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  We have, and we found that the story goes back at least to 1933, when this new mascara and eyebrow dye came on the market in America. It was called Lashlore, and the advertisements told women that they would radiate personality when they used this product.

• 0:52Regina Barber?

  Who wouldn't want that?

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 0:53Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  But unfortunately, Lashlore contained a chemical dye that blinded several women, and it led to another one's death. And that was at a time before the Food and Drug Administration had the power to ban dangerous chemicals in cosmetics and personal care products. So partly because of Lashlore, Congress eventually passed a law called the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, and that gave the FDA the ability to regulate cosmetics.

• 1:21Regina Barber?

  But I'm guessing that didn't totally solve everything, right?

• 1:25Speaker 02

  No, it did not, because on the one hand, our laws are stricter than they were in 1933. Like, if another product like Lashlore came on the market, something that made people go blind, the FDA would have the power to ban it and most likely would do that. But when we were reporting this episode, we were surprised to find out there's still a lot the FDA can't and doesn't do when it comes to personal care product safety.

• 1:48Regina Barber?

  Like what? Like, what are the limits?

• 1:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, when the FDA approves drugs, it looks at safety and efficacy, and it does that before a drug can ever be sold to Americans. But when I talked to Linda Katz, she's a doctor and former director of the Office of Cosmetics and Colors at the FDA, she said that for cosmetics, which include not just makeup, but shampoo, body wash, hairspray, lotion, anything designed to cleanse, beautify, or alter your appearance.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  FDA regulates cosmetics all post-market.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  We do not review any applications beforehand, and we evaluate post-market for safety. We do not evaluate for efficacy.

• 2:27Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  There is one exception, I should say, for certain color additives. I also want to note that we interviewed Dr. Katz in October 2024, and she retired a few months later this January, so that's why she's the former director. But the FDA confirmed to us that this information is still accurate.

• 2:45Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I didn't realize that companies don't have to present their cosmetic products to the FDA for approval before they go on market.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was surprising to me, too. And we learned that there aren't actually many chemicals that the FDA bans or restricts in cosmetics. So there is a list, but it's a short one with only 11 ingredients, and those include things like chloroform and mercury compounds.

• 3:10Regina Barber?

  Right.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  More than half of those regulations happened in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. But the problem is that some of the ingredients in cosmetics today, like formaldehyde or phthalates, parabens, they're concerning to the scientists who study their effects on human health. We talked to Dana Yano. She's an epidemiologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.

• 3:31Speaker 04

  There are well-known studies and lots of evidence that support that many of the personal care products that we use on our skin and our hair, they contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals. We're also seeing that there are some classes of personal care products that also can contain carcinogens.

• 3:55Regina Barber?

  Today on the show, the safety of cosmetic ingredients. Marielle gets into what it means for a product to be safe and what the latest research shows on some current ingredients of concern. I'm Regina Barber.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  And I'm Marielle Segarra.

• 4:07Regina Barber?

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• 5:26Regina Barber?

  All right, in this Short Wave Life Kit collab, Marielle, you're going to walk us through three takeaways from your reporting on the safety of like, personal care products. Where do you want to start?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Well, one thing we were wondering when we reported this is if these cosmetic ingredients are so concerning, and there's evidence that they're linked to endocrine disruption or cancer, why hasn't the FDA banned them?

• 5:48Regina Barber?

  What's the answer?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  We got a couple of answers. One, and this is our first takeaway, is that the safety of some cosmetic ingredients is still being debated. On its website, the FDA says, under US law, cosmetic companies are responsible for marketing, quote, "safe, properly labeled products using no prohibited ingredients." But what does "safe" mean? Here's Linda Katz, formerly of the FDA.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  Actually, it's in Section 608(c)(2) of the FDNC 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.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:06Speaker 07

  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.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Emily says it's especially hard to prove that something is a carcinogen.

• 7:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  It's difficult and expensive. And so a lot of the evidence we have on cosmetics comes from animal studies.

• 7:52Speaker 07

  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.

• 8:05Speaker 07

  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.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Emily says, just because we don't have those definitive studies doesn't mean there's no link between certain cosmetic ingredients and cancer. The American Cancer Society gets at this in a statement on its website where it says, quote, "Human studies of the long-term effects of most cosmetics, except perhaps hair dyes, don't exist," end quote. And so there's, quote, "little evidence and little is known about the health effects of long-term exposure to many ingredients in cosmetics." Lynda Katz told us that the FDA reviews the published literature and any data that's presented to the agency on each of these ingredients of concern. And she said it's a long process adding chemicals to the banned list. We as individuals have to look closely at the ingredient list on each of our personal

• 9:14Speaker 02

  care products and make these decisions for ourselves.

• 9:17Regina Barber?

  All right, and that brings us to the second takeaway. Learn about ingredients of concern, starting with fragrance.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yes, and a quick note here, we are going to cover some of the major ingredients of concern, the ones that kept coming up as we talked to epidemiologists, but this is not an exhaustive list. So epidemiologists study disease in the population. We talked to ones who focused specifically on the safety of ingredients in personal care products. And they told us one of their big red flags when they're reading a product label is the word fragrance. That's because of a law about product labeling. Under the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, companies have to list a cosmetic product's ingredients on the label, except for anything that gives the product its scent. They can describe that using one word. Fragrance.

• 10:04Speaker 08

  Sometimes there's hundreds of different chemicals that go into making that fragrance. And what exactly those chemicals are, are all protected by trade secret. And so because we often do not know what those constituent ingredients are, it's just hard to say that those ingredients are safe.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  That's Melanie Benish, 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.

• 10:34Regina Barber?

  Right.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:53Speaker 07

  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.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Phthalates are known hormone disruptors.

• 11:04Speaker 07

  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.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Like, there have been a lot of studies showing a link between high phthalate levels in pregnant women and preterm birth.

• 11:19Regina Barber?

  Wow. So with all that in mind, like, does Emily have any advice?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Definitely.

• 11:24Speaker 07

  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.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  So you can either avoid fragrance entirely, or you can look for products that say on the label their fragrance is phthalate-free.

• 11:42Regina Barber?

  Okay, that's helpful. Marielle, next up is takeaway three, right?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one is a roundup of some other ingredients of concern. And a big one is formaldehyde.

• 11:51Regina Barber?

  Ooh, yeah, I bet.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  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. And it's released when these products are heated during the straightening process. Formaldehyde gas can cause other health problems, too. From short-term lung irritation and eye irritation to headaches, dizziness, and asthma with repeat exposures. Wow. The Environmental Working Group filed a petition with the FDA in 2021 to get the agency to ban formaldehyde in hair straightening ingredients.

• 12:27Speaker 07

  The FDA has indicated that they are going to ban formaldehyde, but we haven't seen a proposed rule. We don't know if and when that's coming out, but those are products to avoid.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Another common chemical of concern is 1,4-dioxane. According to the FDA, this is a contaminant that can show up in trace amounts in some cosmetics. It's a byproduct of the manufacturing process. The US Department of Health and Human Services identifies it as a potential carcinogen, and the Environmental Protection Agency calls it a likely human carcinogen, based on animal studies. Interesting. The FDA says 1,4-dioxane may be present in ingredients that contain the prefix, word, or syllables PEG, polyethylene, polyethylene glycol, polyoxyethylene, F, or oxenol. But the agency also notes that, according to some analyses, the amount contained in cosmetics is likely too low to cause health problems.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  So again, this choice is up to consumers. Yeah, as always. Yeah. So the last ingredient of concern I'm going to mention, parabens. Parabens are synthetic antimicrobial chemicals added to cosmetics because they act as a preservative, which allows companies to keep products on shelves and for you to keep them in your makeup drawer longer.

• 13:45Speaker 07

  Increasingly, evidence from both the toxicological studies, so those are the ones in animal models, and then also studies in humans, shows that they interfere with hormone levels in our bodies. Our hormone levels are very tightly regulated, and so they can be disrupted pretty easily by external things like parabens coming into our system.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Huh. There have been some links between parabens and poor reproductive health. And researchers are also looking into a potential link between parabens and breast cancer, but the evidence is limited. So Emily says the research isn't quite settled when it comes to parabens, because there just haven't been enough studies yet.

• 14:23Speaker 07

  I don't think we have a slam dunk yet with parabens. I think the jury's still out a little bit on, you know, what are the health outcomes that they may be causing? But I would say there's enough evidence to, you know, at least make you think twice before you put something that says parabens on the label on your body.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  You can find out if a personal care product has parabens by looking at the label.

• 14:46Speaker 07

  There are a variety of different parabens, but they almost all have paraben in the name.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And you can also look for products that say paraben-free.

• 14:55Speaker 07

  OK.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  The unfortunate reality here is companies might be replacing parabens with other preservatives that could ultimately prove harmful. They just haven't been studied widely yet. But Adana Yanos at Columbia University says, given the current data...

• 15:09Speaker 04

  I do think that searching for products that are paraben-free would be a good idea. Because at least we, you know, we have data on parabens and their activities and their potential for adverse health.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Keep in mind, this is a long game.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's really hard for people to just cold turkey, give up all the products that they love if they found out that they were more toxic than they would have liked.

• 15:39Speaker 07

  That's like, I think, one of the real challenges with this area is that, you know, right now, all of the burden is sort of on the consumer to try to navigate, like, all of these chemicals, many of which have very long and complicated names. You know, wouldn't it be nice if we had a scenario where there was more regulations so that it's not up to us to figure out what we think is safe and what isn't, but it just wasn't put on the shelves if there was, like, potentially a risk to our health?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  All right, it's time for a recap.

• 16:12Speaker 07

  Excellent.

• 16:12Speaker 02

  Takeaway one, the safety of some cosmetic ingredients is still being debated, and it takes the FDA a long time to ban ingredients. So it is up to us to learn about the products we're using and make these choices.

• 16:24Speaker 07

  OK.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  And then takeaways two and three are to learn about current ingredients of concern, including fragrance, which often includes phthalates. Phthalates can also be present in other products. And there's also formaldehyde, 1,4-dioxane, and parabens.

• 16:40Speaker 07

  Marielle, thank you so much for bringing us your reporting.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Anytime.

• 16:47Regina Barber?

  This episode was originally produced by Claire Marie Schneider and edited by Megan Kane. With special thanks to Carmel Roth. It was produced for Short Wave by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Beth Zonovan is our senior director and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy.

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