Cancer-causing chemicals are in many beauty products women use, a study finds

May 8, 20255:00 AM ET

puhhha/iStockphoto/Getty ImagesA study recruited Black and Latina women and asked them to log all the beauty products they use in a week. More than half of the women used products with known carcinogens.

More than half of Black and Latina women in Los Angeles who participated in a new study regularly used personal-care products containing a known carcinogen.

Study participants photographed the ingredient lists of all the products they used at home over the course of a week. The journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters published the study Wednesday.

Of 64 women, researchers found that 53% reported using soap, lotion, shampoo, conditioner, skin lightener, eyeliner, eyelash glue and other beauty products that contained formaldehyde and formaldehyde-releasing preservatives — toxins found to cause cancer in humans.

"It's really concerning that we are intentionally putting chemicals that release a carcinogen into our products that we apply to ourselves every day," said lead author Robin Dodson, associate director of research at Silent Spring Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit studying environmental causes of breast cancer.

"Formaldehyde is a great preservative," she said. "That's why it's used as an embalming fluid. And we do have to remember formaldehyde is a carcinogen."

The study is among the first to demonstrate that formaldehyde-releasing preservatives are present in a wide range of beauty products.

The research, collected in 2021, focused on Black and Latina women after previous studies showed they are more often exposed to formaldehyde in nail and hair products than white women. Researchers have questioned whether African American women's frequent use of chemical hair straighteners, suspected of containing formaldehyde-releasing agents, might explain why breast, uterine and ovarian cancers kill disproportionately more Black than white women.

In 2023, a dozen years after a federal agency classified formaldehyde a human carcinogen, the Food and Drug Administration was tentatively scheduled to unveil a proposal to consider banning the chemical in hair straighteners. Two years later, the government still has failed to act. The FDA declined to commen

By Ronnie Cohen