Lipstick covered lips

Toward a Better Beauty Regimen: Reducing Potential EDC Exposures from Personal Care Products

As a high school student in Salinas, California, Irene Vera was part of the Youth Community Council, a project of the University of California, Berkeley, Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS).

October 5, 2016 | Source: Environmental Health Perspectives | by Carrie Arnold

As a high school student in Salinas, California, Irene Vera was part of the Youth Community Council, a project of the University of California, Berkeley, Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS). This project aims to train local youth as environmental health leaders through research, education, and advocacy, and it was through the Youth Community Council that Vera learned about potential endocrine-disrupting chemicals in personal care products. She and fellow council members worked with Kim Harley, an environmental health scientist at UC Berkeley, to study how teen girls are exposed to these chemicals and steps they can take to lower their exposures.1

The HERMOSA (Health and Environmental Research on Makeup of Salinas Adolescents) study measured the exposure of Latina teens to certain phthalates, parabens, triclosan, and benzophenone-3 in makeup and other personal care products (hermosa means “beautiful” in Spanish). These compounds have shown endocrine activity in animal and cell studies.2,3,4,5

Women are disproportionately exposed to phthalates and parabens because they use more personal care products on average than men.6 Teenage girls tend to use even more products than women, averaging 17 different products per day, compared with 12 for women.7

What remains unclear, however, is whether these exposures actually harm people. “We don’t know if there are long-term health effects of [these] chemicals, but we have reasons to be concerned about exposure to teenage girls, who often use a lot of these products during a time of rapid reproductive development,” Harley says.

It is also unclear how much of a person’s total exposure comes specifically from personal care products. Parabens, phthalates, benzophenone-3, and triclosan are widely used, says Ruthann Rudel, director of research at the Silent Spring Institute. “With chemicals that are so common,” she says, “it’s hard to know which sources influence exposure the most.” Rudel was not involved in the study.

Vera and the other teens on the Youth Community Council were involved with every aspect of the study, from recruiting participants to analyzing data. The students enrolled friends and classmates for a final sample size of 100 Latina adolescents from around the Salinas area. All the girls were educated on the potential risks of endocrine disruptors as a way to motivate both participation and compliance with the study protocol.

Girls who agreed to participate were provided with replacement personal care products and instructed to use these alternatives for 3 days. The replacement products were chosen on the basis of whether their ingredient lists included triclosan, BP-3, or parabens. Phthalates are not listed on ingredient lists, but they are often found in scented products. So the researchers avoided products that listed “fragrance” as an ingredient unless they were specifically labeled as phthalate free.1