Q&A: How can women protect themselves from chemicals in personal care products?
October 31, 2025
While many people read labels when buying food at the grocery store, far fewer of us read the labels of the products we put on the exteriors of our bodies. That’s understandable. Often, the ingredients in our deodorant, shampoo, and make-up are long, unpronounceable words, and we are not sure which ingredients are a threat. Yet, research has shown that some of these ingredients, including phthalates, parabens, and bisphenol A, can harm our health when used long-term.
Lariah Edwards, an associate research scientist at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, studies chemical exposures from personal care products and is the co-lead author of a recently published study in Environmental Justice on how selective shopping for products among Black and Latina women affected their chemical exposures. The study, which tracked the beauty product use of 70 women, is from a community-academic partnership called the Taking Stock study in which researchers partnered with a community organization to engage with women about their beauty products.
Edwards spoke with Women Child Health about why women of color feel pressured to use personal care products, why buying cleaner products is a challenge, and how all of us can reduce our risk of chemical exposures in personal care products. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Woman Child Health: Can you talk about how you became interested in studying this connection between personal care product use in women of color and then their chemical exposures?
Edwards: I am an environmental health scientist by training; I have a background in studying these chemicals that are found in personal care products. We call them endocrine-disrupting chemicals or hormone-altering chemicals because they mess with or disrupt the endocrine system.
These same chemicals that I used to wear gloves and handle carefully in the lab, I noticed they’re in my lotions and in my shampoos, and I think that was probably in 2015 or 2016. During that time, there was a greater recognition around personal care products as a source of exposure for chemicals, but it wasn’t really until I started working with my advisor, Dr. Ami Zota, who, with her colleague Dr. Bhavna Shamasunder, coined this term of “beauty justice,” or the environmental injustice of beauty. This is the idea that, because of these racialized beauty norms that are very much ingrained in our society, where folks of lighter skin and straighter hair are perceived and deemed more worthy of attention, more beautiful, the rest of folks – myself included – are targeted and told that we should use these products to make ourselves look a certain way. And because we use more of these products, we then are exposed to more of these chemicals.
It wasn’t until I started this work that I really got to bring my whole self into my work and think about how the way I identify and the way society perceives me may create certain pressures or feelings to use products that then lead to more chemical exposure, because all of our products have chemicals in them.
These chemicals serve a purpose. The ones we found in our study, like parabens, are preservatives. They make sure your products don’t go bad. So, I’m not necessarily anti-chemical; I just want products that are safe for us.
Woman Child Health: Yeah. Since you’ve touched on this idea of beauty justice, can you talk about how beauty standards and expectations are connecting to these chemical exposures?
Edwards: Yeah, absolutely. We probably all, at some point in time, have felt pressure to look a certain way. I grew up in a small Midwestern town where not many folks were Black, and I started at a young age to realize, oh, my hair doesn’t lay straight. It is curly, and it is big, and it is frizzy. And so, you started to feel those pressures to use certain products – I certainly did.
There are pressures based on what our society has deemed that people should look like. Often, it’s a very narrow idea, a very small view of how someone should look. And when you’re using these products, you’re exposing yourself to all the chemicals that are in them.
We talk about beauty and cosmetics, but this is an everyone problem because men, people of all genders, use lotions, toothpaste, shampoos, conditioners, all of these products, and they all contain multiple chemicals. Our research very much focuses on women because we know they’re heavy users of personal care products, but they’re not the only users, and we should do a better job including others into this thought about who is being exposed to personal care products and who is being pressured to use products to align with a way that society says that we should look.
Woman Child Health: I have found it really interesting in the past few years to see how there’s so much more marketing of products now to men. And I’m like, well, I guess this is moving toward equality, but maybe not in the direction we want to go.
Edwards: Right? My own partner, he’ll now go to the store and buy his own beard products that are being marketed to him, his own shampoos and conditioners, and I always ask, “What’s in that?”
Woman Child Health: All right, in your study, what did you learn about the shopping habits and chemical exposures among women?
Edwards: In this study, we were trying to understand the personal care product shopping behaviors of women in South L.A. – Black and Latina women – and then trying to understand if those shopping behaviors were related to any chemical concentrations in their bodies.
We used surveys to understand what their shopping behaviors were. So, do you consider product ingredients? Do you avoid products with parabens or phthalates? We used a smartphone app to understand what products they were using throughout the course of a week. They were able to take pictures and log their products so we could understand what they were using. How many products are they using? What’s in these products? And then we took urine samples and measured for 28 common personal care product chemicals.
From the survey data, we found that these women are considering their product ingredients as they’re buying them, which is great. We divided up our women into those who said they avoid certain ingredients and those who said they don’t avoid certain ingredients. We found that the ones that said they avoid certain ingredients have lower levels of that chemical in their urine.. So, for example, Black women who said they avoid products with fragrance have lower levels of a very common fragrance chemical in their body. Latina women who avoided products with oxybenzone/BP-3, a common sunscreen ingredient, had lower levels of oxybenzone/BP-3.
We’re seeing that you can effectively shop your way to safety. Although we like that phrase, we don’t always love that phrase because not everybody can afford to shop their way to safety, and you shouldn’t have to. It’s a burden, frankly.
Woman Child Health: Yeah, it is. It takes more time, more money, all of that.
What are some of the barriers to women buying cleaner products that expose them to fewer chemicals? And I realize there isn’t a standard definition of clean.
Edwards: One of the big barriers is access. Oftentimes, products that are nontoxic or organic are more expensive, so if you are working on limited income, you don’t have the means to go out and replace all your products or buy those that often cost more. Then, the advice to shop your way to safety isn’t applicable or helpful.
Also, are the stores that sell those products in your neighborhood? I have a colleague that has done research looking at Boston neighborhoods and saw that areas that are lower income with a higher percentage of people of color often are selling products that are considered more toxic. I live in New York, and when I need a shampoo or conditioner, I recognize that if I just walk up the street, my beauty supply store may not have the greatest variety of clean or nontoxic products.
You can buy things online, certainly, but it is very convenient to be able to walk out of your house and down the street and buy that product immediately when you need it.
Woman Child Health: What is happening on the policy front in terms of regulating some of these chemicals and personal products? I imagine it varies by state.
Edwards: It does vary by state, and we have seen some states have very robust policies around banning certain chemicals from these products, including California and Maryland. Washington State just banned formaldehyde from some personal care products. State by state, we see a lot of what folks feel is needed are outright bans of certain chemicals or classes of chemicals in products, so your phthalates, your PFAS chemicals, formaldehyde. We are hopeful that, on a federal level, we will get there one day with the FDA, but we’re not there yet.
Woman Child Health: The number of chemicals that we’re supposed to be watching for can feel overwhelming. I’m coming from a public health background, and even I don’t know how many different things I’m supposed to be looking for in my products. How can we do a better job of educating women – really, all people – but I’m specifically thinking of women, about the risks of personal care products?
Edwards: Right now, because of where we are on a regulatory standpoint, the burden is on consumers, and that is not how it should be. I’m at an age where many of my friends are parents, and they don’t want to have to think about what they can put on their kids’ hair and bodies. It’s a mental burden that’s exhausting.
The best thing to do is to be informed. Read your product labels and see what’s on them. There are apps like Clearya or Environmental Working Group Skin Deep Cosmetics Database to look up your products, and they will show you what chemicals are in them and whether any of these chemicals are concerning. For example, this chemical is banned in the EU because of concerns about allergens or endocrine disruptions. There are organizations like Toxic-Free Future and Campaign For Safe Cosmetics that are doing this work and have a lot of things online that are easy to read and digest to help you make more informed decisions.
For the folks who think that’s exhausting and don’t want to do all this research before they buy a product, I recommend using fewer products. Maybe you don’t need to use a body spray during the day. Maybe you don’t need to use two conditioners or two lotions. If you use fewer products, you will be exposed to fewer chemicals.
And for folks who run a pretty lean ship when it comes to their personal care product routine, you can get involved in a lot of these organizations. They are advocating for regulations that help keep our products safer. You can let your politicians know that you care about this issue, and they should vote accordingly.
It’s not necessarily about shopping. It’s also about what can you stop using? What can you take away from your routine? And then how can you make your voice heard and let people know that this is an important issue they should be voting on?
Woman Child Health: Yes, and using fewer products saves you some money as well.
Edwards: It certainly does. I also tell folks I’m not perfect. For the products I use on a regular basis, like my hair conditioner, my deodorant, my mascara, I make sure those are very clean because I use them very frequently. But, for example, I rarely wear a full face of foundation, and when I do, it’s not the cleanest foundation because I don’t wear it very often, and that’s just one thing I don’t want to think about. So even the folks in this space, we aren’t perfect, so don’t feel like you have to be because it is exhausting.
Woman Child Health: Yes, and it’s just one facet, right? There’s the whole food conversation.
Edwards: We’ll be here all day.
Woman Child Health: Is there anything else that we haven’t talked about that you would like to touch on?
Edwards: This work is certainly a credit to the on-the-ground team in California because this is a community-academic partnership. The folks at Black Women for Wellness, the community health organizers that are being organized by our partner, LA Grit Media in California, those were the folks who were engaging participants during COVID, when they had to take their entire plan and switch it to virtual or meet people six feet away in front of their houses.
I think when it comes to work like this, community-academic partnerships are the way to go because researchers can only do so much. And frankly, we have blind spots, and people have their rightful concerns about working with academic scientists. Working with community groups really made this a success.
Thank you for talking with us, Dr. Edwards!
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