Fast unmasking toxicity of safe personal care products

Abstract

Personal care products are used several times a day and come into contact with the skin for many hours. As hazard-related data on products are rare, an imaging safety screening was developed. For the first time, it detected known and unknown hazardous compounds in 140 personal care products from 20 different product segments, including beauty and lifestyle products. The evidence-based chromatographic–hazard-related profiling detected genotoxic, cytotoxic, and estrogenic compounds, which were assigned to structural groups, and revealed that personal care products are not as safe as stated. Wound-healing and nipple creams in contact with babies as well as lipsticks used by adolescents were shown to contain highly toxic compounds able to enter the bloodstream via wounds, micro-injuries or bleeding gums and contaminate nature when washed off. Dose-response curves pointed to half-maximal genotoxic effect doses (EC₅₀) of around 60 µg of such products which can easily be exceeded by a factor of 100,000 for only 6 g product applied or for an aggregated use of various products increasing genotoxic exposure, as observed in consumer profiles. Simulated metabolization via S9 liver enzymes did not lead to detoxification. The new safety screening not only unmasked quickly the toxicity of personal care products but also provided an understanding of how to produce hazard-free products. It empowers industries to produce future products in compliance with their standards and claims in terms of consumer health, ethics, environmental compatibility, and sustainability, and authorities to control the safety of products on the market and tackle the current underregulation.