People are adding more than a little color to their lips when they apply lipstick, according to a recent study.
Metals such as chromium and cadmium were found in lipstick and lip gloss brands at levels considered potentially harmful to a person’s health, according to a study published online in May in Environmental Health Perspectives.
The study, which took about four years to complete, analyzed 32 lipstick and lip gloss brands for nine metals: aluminum, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, manganese, nickel, lead and titanium. The brands were used by teenage girls in Forward Together — then known as the Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice — a group serving young Asian adults in low-income areas of Oakland, Calif.
“This is a product that is widely used in the population and therefore, if there are problems, there are large numbers of people affected by it,” said S. Katharine Hammond, PhD, MS, a study author and professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. “In the particular case of the young women of whom we were working with, it was to increase their awareness of their environment and to get them to think about those issues.”
Prolonged exposure to certain metals could result in neurological damage, lung cancer and respiratory damage. For example, cadmium, a human carcinogen, can be stored in kidneys and lead to damage, Hammond said.
“That could be an issue for people who have compromised kidneys, like diabetics,” Hammond told The Nation’s Health.
The study used California Environmental Protection Agency standards to judge what is an acceptable level of metal to ingest from lipstick and lip gloss.
Average daily use for lipstick or gloss is 24 milligrams or two to three applications daily. High daily use was 87 milligrams — nine times a day or two to three heavy applications, Hammond said.
In some products, the average user consumed more than 20 percent of an acceptable level of aluminum, cadmium, chromium and manganese, the study said. For high use, 91 percent of products containing chromium had unsafe levels of the metal, followed by 66 percent of products with manganese, 63 percent with aluminum and 31 percent for cadmium. The study did not list specific brands.
Hammond’s concern is the cumulative effect consuming these metals daily could have with other things consumed daily, such as water, that contain metals.
Hammond said FDA should look into these products and consider regulation. FDA currently does not regulate metals in cosmetics, she said.
“I understand they have limited resources, but in general this is a place where FDA needs to look at a product of extremely wide usage that has the potential to be creating some problems for people,” Hammond said.
For more information, visit http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/wp-content/uploads/121/5/ehp.1205518.pdf.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
