A study recruited black and Latin women and asked them to record all the beauty products they use in a week. More than half of women have used products with known carcinogens.
Puhhha / Istockphoto / Getty images
hide
tilting legend
Puhhha / Istockphoto / Getty images
More than half of the black and Latin women in Los Angeles who participated in a new study regularly used personal care products containing a known carcinogen.
Study participants photographed the ingredient lists of all the products they used at home during a week. The newspaper Enstable Sciences and Technology Letters published the study on Wednesday.
Out of 64 women, the researchers found that 53% said they used soap, lotion, shampoo, revitalizing, skin lighting, eyeliner, eyelash glue and other beauty products that contained formaldehyde and preservatives releasing formaldehyde – toxins found to cause cancer in humans.
“It is really worrying that we intentionally put chemicals that release a carcinogenic in our products that we apply every day,” said principal author Robin Dodson, deputy research director at Silent Spring Institute, a non -profit organization in Massachusetts to study the environmental causes of breast cancer.
“The formaldehyde is a great curator,” she said. “This is why it is used as an embalming liquid. And we must remember that formaldehyde is a carcinogen.”
The study is among the first to demonstrate that preservatives releasing formaldehyde are present in a wide range of beauty products.
Research, collected in 2021, focused on black and Latin women after previous studies showed that they are more often exposed to formaldehyde in nail and hair products than white women. Researchers have wondered if the frequent use of African-American women of chemical hair straighteners, suspected of containing agents releasing formaldehyde, could explain why breast, uterine and ovary cancers kill more black people than white women.
In 2023, a dozen years after a federal agency classified formaldehyde a human carcinogen, the Food and Drug Administration should temporarily reveal a proposal aimed at banning chemicals in hair straighteners. Two years later, the government has still not acted. The FDA refused to comment.
The new study shows that formaldehyde and formaldehyde release release products are present not only in hair relaxants, but in a wide variety of beauty products, including some that women apply to their bodies much more frequently than chemical hair smoking.
A study participant used three formaldehyde products: an without rinsing conditioner, rinse conditioner and body wash. Another participant was washed with hand soap with formaldehyde liberation agents on average twice a day.
A range of products
The number of products – 1,143 over seven days – The 64 participants used struck Tracey Woodruff, who heads the University of California to the San Francisco program on reproductive health and the environment. The women of the study used on average 17 different products per day – as little as 5 and up to 43.
“This testifies to the pressure that women have to look at in a way,” said Woodruff, who was not involved in the new research.
Social and economic pressures frequently oblige black women to modify their appearance to comply with white beauty standards, said the co-author of the Janette Robinson Flint, executive director of Black Women for Wellness. She called on government to monitor personal care products. “We should not have to be chemists to understand what types of products will make us sick,” she said.
“Beauty standards that focus on the presentation of whites definitively lead to people who use products that can be harmful to their health,” said Woodruff. “This is part of the heritage and the history of discrimination against the black and Latin population.”
Woodruff would have liked the study to also compare the use of products by white women in order to assess whether the use of beauty producers contributes to health inequalities.
Woodruff and Dodson joined Flint to call for government surveillance and cosmetics regulation and other personal care products.
Prohibited in Europe
In addition to being a carcinogenic, formaldehyde, colorless and smelly gas, can cause rashes and can abrupt those who breathe it, according to the FDA. Formaldehyde release products do not need to be listed as a formaldehyde on ingredient labels. Instead, they are listed by their chemical names, such as DMDM Hydantoin, abridged for the 1.3-Dimethylol-5.5-Dimethydantoin, which, like Dodson, does not exactly deploy the language.
The European Union prohibited formaldehyde as a cosmetic ingredient in 2009, and any cosmetic product containing a conservative of formaldehyde liberation above a tiny concentration must include a warning. At least 12 states, including California and Washington, have recently proposed or promulgated laws to regulate the use of formaldehyde in cosmetics.
The way laws will protect consumers remain to be seen. Reports to the SAFE Cosmetics cosmetics of the California Ministry of Public Health show a drop in products containing formaldehyde from 2009 to 2022.
“In the short term, tomorrow, I think consumers should do their best to read product labels,” said Dodson. “In the longer term, I think there must be a regulatory solution. It must be summed up in ingredient prohibitions, probably at the level of the state.”
