Safety Guide To Children's Personal Care Products
Parent's buying guide
Printable PDF guide
Brand buying guide
Ingredients to avoid

EWG Report
Summary
Exposures add up
Children are vulnerable
Why aren't all products safe?
Methodology
Survey results
References
News release

EWG's online survey of personal care product use for more than 3,300 children shows that children are routinely exposed to complex mixtures of ingredients through everyday products like shampoo, lotion, sunscreen, and hand soap. While FDA and the cosmetic industry's safety panel review ingredients for safety one at a time when they review them at all, our survey shows that children's exposures do not happen one ingredient at a time. On average a child is exposed to five dozen ingredients daily. The health risks from these exposures can be additive across ingredients and cumulative over a lifetime.

Children's weekly exposures: Our survey shows that the average child uses 7 personal care products each week, with 90 unique chemical ingredients. Even the average infant (under 1 year) is exposed to 6 products and 67 unique chemicals every week.

Children's daily exposures: On any given day, the average child uses almost 5 personal care products, with 61 unique chemical ingredients. A typical infant is exposed to 4 products and 44 unique chemicals every day.

Among the findings of this survey are the following:

• 3.6 percent of children are exposed to ingredients that are known or probable carcinogens every week through their use of personal care products, and 88 percent of children are exposed to ingredients that have some evidence of carcinogenicity every week.
• Nearly all children are exposed every week to ingredients that may be contaminated with the top 7 carcinogenic impurities common to personal care product ingredients - hydroquinone, ethylene dioxide, 1,4-dioxane, formaldehyde, nitrosamines, PAHs, and acrylamide.
• 82 percent of children are exposed to ingredients that are known to be neurotoxic every week through their use of personal care products, and 99 percent of children are exposed to ingredients that are suspected to be neurotoxic.
• 69 percent of children are exposed to ingredients that are suspected hormone disruptors every week through their use of personal care products.
• 5 percent of children are exposed each week to personal care product ingredients that are known or probable reproductive and developmental toxins, linked to impaired fertility or developmental harm for a baby in the womb or a child, and 95 percent of children are exposed to personal care product ingredients that are suspected reproductive and developmental toxins. These statistics do not account for exposures to phthalates that testing shows appear in an estimated three quarters of all personal care products but that, as components of fragrance, are not listed on product ingredient labels (EWG 2002).
• 99 percent of children are exposed to ingredients that are penetration enhancers, ingredients that help other chemicals absorb into the skin, every week through their use of personal care products.

The personal care product industry's self-policing safety panel, the Cosmetic Ingredient Review, approaches each safety assessment as if consumers are exposed to just one chemical at a time, and as if personal care products are the only source of exposure for each chemical considered. The panel is often wrong on both counts.

The results of this survey in combination with other studies show that people are exposed to hundreds of chemicals over the course of a day (Thornton 2002; CDC 2005; EWG 2005), and that people face multiple sources of exposure from multiple consumer products for some of the common industrial chemicals used as cosmetic ingredients. Exposures can add up. The industry's panel does not consider the reality of patterns of human exposures - additive effects of exposures to multiple chemicals linked to common health harms - in declaring chemicals "safe as used" in cosmetics.

By considering the human body to be a "clean slate" free of background contamination, free of related chemicals linked to common health harms, and free of exposures from other kinds of consumer products, the industry's panel will every time underestimate the potential for a particular personal care product ingredient to harm human health.