Smooth, foamy, waterproof. These characteristics are extremely desirable in beauty products, but manufacturers sometimes use fluoride-containing ingredients, including potentially harmful perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), to achieve them. Now, researchers reporting in ACS’s Environmental Science & Technology show that some cosmetics and personal care products labeled with fluorinated components also contain PFASs, whether or not these “forever chemicals” are listed as ingredients.
Although the most concerning PFASs are no longer used in many beauty products, in some cases they have been replaced by other classes of PFASs that have unknown health and environmental impacts. And a recent study found that numerous cosmetics in the US and Canada still contain these substances. However, it is not clear if these compounds are found in personal care products such as creams, cleansers, shampoos, and shaving creams. So Amy Rand and her colleagues wanted to test a variety of beauty products that listed fluorinated components in their formulations for the presence of PFAS.
In 2020 and 2021, the team purchased 38 beauty products available in local stores in Canada and online that contained organofluorine compounds and tested them for older types of PFAS. All samples had measurable levels of PFAS, but some of the compounds detected were not listed as ingredients in the products. The levels found in personal care products were generally lower than in cosmetics. And the team identified that two foundations, labeled with terms similar to “waterproof,” had high levels of total PFAS, one of which was in the thousands of parts per million (ppm), a level that exceeds Canadian PFAS regulations. proposals.
The researchers then took a subset of the purchased items and screened them for more than 200 additional PFASs, including emerging classes that are replacing legacy compounds. An emerging class, the monohydrogen-substituted perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids, was found in 30% of the subset with amounts from less than one ppb to hundreds of ppb. During this analysis, they also found a variety of structurally diverse PFASs that did not appear to be related to the PFASs originally added to the products, which the researchers suggest could be the result of product aging or contamination by impurities in the materials. cousins. These results show the diversity of PFAS compounds, and the wide ranges of their amounts, present in some cosmetics and personal care products currently sold in Canada, but the researchers say more work is needed to understand where unexpected PFASs come from. .
The authors acknowledge funding from various discovery grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) John R. Evans Leaders Fund, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec — Nature et technologies .
Story source:
Materials provided by american chemical society. Note: Content can be edited for style and length.
Source: news.google.com