Short Wave - What's In Your Personal Care Products?

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

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.See 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

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, ShoreWavers, Regina Barber here with LifeKit host, Mariel Seagata. Hey, Mariel. Hey, Jena. Okay, so, Mariel, recently on LifeKit, you've been reporting on the safety of personal care products. 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 Lash Lour. and the advertisements told women that they would radiate personality when they used this product.

Who wouldn't want that? Right. Yeah. But unfortunately, Lash Lur 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 Lash Ler, Congress eventually passed. a law called the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, and that gave the FDA the ability to regulate cosmetics. But I'm guessing that didn't like totally solve everything, right? No, it did not,

because on the one hand, our laws are stricter than they were in 1933. Like if another product like Lash Lure 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 don't. doesn't do when it comes to personal care product safety. Like what? Like what are the limits? 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 talk 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. FDA regulates cosmetics all post-market. We do not review any applications beforehand, and we evaluate post-market for safety. We do not evaluate for efficacy. Wow. There is one exception, I should say, for certain color additives. I also want to note that we interviewed Dr. Katz in October, 24, 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. 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. 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. Right. 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 thalates, parabins, they're concerning to the scientists who study their effects on human health. We talked to Adana Yano. She's an epidemiologist at Columbia University's Millman School of Public Health. 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.

Today on the show, the safety of cosmetic ingredients. Mariel 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. And I'm Mariel Segarra. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. are. All right, in this shortwave Life Kit collab, Mariel, you're going to walk us through three takeaways from your reporting on the safety of personal care products. Where do you want to start? 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? What's the answer? We got a couple 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 U.S. 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. Actually, it's in Section 608C2 of the FDNC Act, as amended under Mokra, 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, you're, 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. Yeah. 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. So the way U.S. research is funded, it usually is in like five years. your 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.

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 and cosmetics. Linda 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 band list.

We as individuals have to look closely at the ingredient list on each of our personal care products and make these decisions for ourselves. All right, and that brings us to the second takeaway. Learn about ingredients of concern, starting with fragrance. 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 talk to ones who focus 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. 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. 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. Right.

Emily Barrett at Rutgers says thalates 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. Thalates 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 thallate-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. 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 and hair-straining ingredients. 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.

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 U.S. 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, P-E-G, polyethylene, polyethylene, glycol, polyoxytheline, F, or oxenol. But the agency also notes that, according to some analyses, the amount containing cosmetics is likely too low to cause health problems. So again, this choice is up to consumers. Yeah, as always. Yeah. So the last ingredient of concern I'm going to mention paraben.

Parabins 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. 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 paraben's coming into our system.

There have been some links between paraben's and poor reproductive health. And researchers are also looking into a potential link between paraben's and breast cancer, but the evidence is limited. So Emily says the research isn't quite settled when it comes to paraben's, because there just haven't been enough studies yet. I don't think we have a slam dunk yet with paraben's. 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 paraben's on the label on your body. You can find out if a personal care product has parabins by looking at the label. There are a variety of different parabens, but they almost all have paraben in the name. And you can also look for products that say paraben free. Okay. The unfortunate reality here is companies might be replacing parabens with other preservatives. could ultimately prove harmful. They just haven't been studied widely yet.

But Adana Yanos at Columbia University says, given the current data... I do think that searching for products that are paraben-free would be a good idea. Because at least we have data on parabins and their activities and their potential for adverse health. Keep in mind, this is a long game. 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. 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 potentially a risk to our health. All right. It's time for a recap. Excellent. 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. Okay. And then takeaways two and three are to learn about current ingredients of concern, including fragrance. which often includes thallates. Thallates can also be present in other products. And there's also formaldehyde, one for dioxane, and paribins.

Mariel, thank you so much for bringing us your reporting. Anytime. This episode was originally produced by Claire Marie Schneider and edited by Megan Kane, with special thanks to Carmel Roth. It was produced for shortwave by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. The audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez. Betz Onovan is our senior director, and Con Campbell is our senior vice president.

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