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Consumer Products

Data missing for many personal care ingredients

Industry-led report identifies high-priority chemicals to eliminate or characterize

by Craig Bettenhausen
October 24, 2024 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 102, Issue 34

A person in a retail store reads the label of an item in their hand.
Credit: Shutterstock

About a third of personal care ingredients are poorly characterized, according to a report published by ChemFORWARD, a collaboration between makers of personal care products, ingredient suppliers including Dow and Inolex, and the nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund.

The report’s authors analyzed the ingredient lists of 8,500 products. After accounting for substances that go by multiple names—such as glycerin, also known as glycerol—they found 2,279 unique ingredients. Of those, 66% are well understood and considered safe, whereas 3% “have known high hazards or are considered emerging chemical classes of concern,” the report says. Another 30% have significant gaps in their safety data.

30%

Ingredients with significant health or environmental safety data gaps

3%

Ingredients considered known or suspected hazards

Source: ChemFORWARD, Beauty and Personal Care Ingredient Intelligence Report, October 2024

Personal care products tend to have a lot of ingredients in common. Glycerol, for example, appeared in 6,300 of the analyzed ingredient lists. At the same time, nearly half the ingredients in the analysis appeared in fewer than 10 products each. The authors combined frequency and hazard data to recommend 10 priority ingredients for elimination and 10 for further characterization. Cyclopentasiloxane tops the list of chemicals the industry should stop using, and the mineral mica is the most in need of robust analysis.

The recommendations include both environmental concerns, such as the accumulation of cyclopentasiloxane in nature, and human health concerns, such as poorly understood inhalation hazards associated with some grades of mica.


Eliminate
Personal care brands should prioritize eliminating these known or likely hazardous ingredients, ChemFORWARD says.
Source: ChemFORWARD, Beauty and Personal Care Ingredient Intelligence Report, October 2024.

To close the data gaps, ChemFORWARD members are collectively funding chemical hazard assessments of ingredients. The report says that in 2023, the group sponsored 25 assessments at a total cost of $125,000. Analyzing the top 10 undercharacterized chemicals is expected to cost around $50,000.

“Although ingredient lists are readily available, information about the potential hazards associated with these ingredients has historically been lacking,” the report says.


Characterize
These commonly used ingredients need better safety data, ChemFORWARD says.
Source: ChemFORWARD, Beauty and Personal Care Ingredient Intelligence Report, October 2024.

David Light, president of the independent analytical-testing laboratory Valisure, says industry’s involvement in the project is “a good sign that the recommendations will be implemented quickly.” Third-party testing and review, along with open access publication of the assessments, would make the project even more useful, Light says.

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