Hyaluronic acid. Niacinamide. Peptides. These are just a few body-friendly ingredients you’d normally expect to find in most of your everyday beauty products. Yet, according to a new study, an alarming number of personal care products have been found to contain formaldehyde, a toxic chemical linked to cancer.
On May 7, the Environmental Science & Technology Letters published a study in which 64 Black and Latina women in Los Angeles logged their use of personal care products for a week, providing researchers with photos of product and ingredient labels throughout the process. By the end of the study, they had examined 1,143 product labels to determine that 53 percent of the women surveyed had been using products that contained formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing chemicals. For the most part, the chemicals were found in skin-care products like hand and body lotions, face serums and moisturizers, though they were also present in shampoos, styling gels, curl creams, conditioners, masks and hair oils.
Formaldehyde is sometimes used in beauty products as a preservative to help certain formulas maintain their shelf lives. But per Dr. Robin Dodson, an exposure scientist at the Silent Spring Institute and one of the lead authors of the study, “repeated exposures like these can add up and cause serious harm.”
This news comes a few months after the release of other studies that showed that over 3,000 beauty products targeted at Black women contained hazardous chemicals. It also follows the discovery of recent data showing that Black women who frequently use hair relaxers are at higher risk of developing uterine and breast cancers.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear way for people to check if a product has formaldehyde, even if they’re trying to read it on a product label. “They have long, weird, funny names, and they typically don’t have the word formaldehyde in them,” Dr. Dodson says. She claims that the best way to reduce exposure would be to require companies to add warning labels to formaldehyde-releasing products. But the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t currently regulate the use of formaldehyde in beauty and personal care products. (The FDA did propose a national ban on formaldehyde and formaldehyde releasers in hair straighteners in 2023, but it has yet to be enacted.)
In 2009, the European Union banned formaldehyde as a cosmetic ingredient and stated that any beauty or personal care product containing a formaldehyde-releasing preservative must include a warning. So far, at least 10 states have proposed legislation to regulate the use of formaldehyde in beauty products.
To check out the full study, read more here.
