The (Unfounded) Scare: Lipstick contains toxic levels of lead, which causes multiple health problems including infertility, miscarriage and brain damage. Pregnant women and their unborn children are especially vulnerable.
Origin of the Scare: The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (an environmentalist group) published a report this year entitled The Poison Kiss . They purchased more than 30 lipsticks in four cities and sent them to a lab for lead testing. More than half came back with detectable levels of lead. The group sent out a press release, which said that one-third of the tested lipsticks exceeded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) 0.1 ppm limit for lead in candy – a standard established to protect children from directly ingesting lead.(1) There was no standard for lipstick, so they used the lead limit for candy instead.
Last spring, there was also an e-mail chain letter that hyped the fear of lead in lipstick. It warned that lipstick causes cancer because it contains a dangerously high level of lead and claimed that “if your lipstick stays on longer, it’s because of the higher content of lead.”(2)
Media Coverage: On October 11th, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics sent out a press release about the Poison Kiss report. The next day major media outlets ran the story under scary headlines such as ABC News’s “Don’t Pucker Up: Lead in Lipstick” and the New York Daily News’s “Some red lipsticks contain unhealthy levels of lead: study.” The Seattle Times took a more neutral approach with the headline “Lead in lipstick: Red alert or false alarm?”(3) In their article, they had a quote from Paula Begoun, known as the “Cosmetics Cop” for her books and website CosmeticsCop.com, in which she evaluates claims made by cosmetics companies. Regarding lead in lipstick, she said that the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics’ report “incorrectly states that lipstick is ingested like candy. It mentions the FDA’s 0.01 parts per million limit for lead in candy, and that no such safety limits exist for lipstick...What’s missing is that women aren’t eating lipsticks in the same manner they do candy or food.”
The Bottom Line: The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics says that it is a coalition of women’s, public health, labor, environmental health and consumer-rights groups. Their stated goal is “to protect the health of consumers and workers by requiring the health and beauty industry to phase out the use of chemicals linked to cancer, birth defects and other health problems, and replace them with safer alternatives.”(4) They are clearly an anti-chemical group with an environmentally-driven agenda. Comparing the lead guidelines for something edible, such as candy, to lead in lipstick is not an accurate technique. At high levels, lead is toxic, but there is no evidence that the small amounts in lipstick pose any threat to human health.(5)
