 Over the past years, the use of cosmetic products has evidently increased at an alarming rate due to unending pursuit for individual beautification. Nothing necessarily wrong with that, unless cosmetic products contain ingredients that may be linked to disease. Ingredients such as toxic heavy metals like lead. Lead has been found in a wide range of cosmetic products, from eye shadow, to skin cream, foundation, blush. I talked about henna before. But looking at the data, an important warning can be recognized. The presence of lead in lipsticks, because you end up inadvertently actually swallowing a little bit of it. It's been estimated that a woman may end up ingesting three pounds of lipstick over her lifetime. Moreover, lipsticks can be used by pregnant women or women of child-bearing age. Duh! Yes, lead is highly toxic, but how much lead can there be in lipstick? Surely it's a very minor source. Nonetheless, one should not exclude the fact that lead accumulates in the body over time, and so repetitive lead-containing lipstick application may lead to significant exposure. But you don't really know until you put it to the test. 32 lipsticks in lip glosses tested, and lead was detected in three-fourths of the products, suggesting public health concerns. But how much lead did they find? About half exceeded the FDA-recommended maximum level, a set for candy. Yeah, but come on now. That limit is set for something kids may eat every day. Kids are not going to eat tubes of lipstick every day. Nevertheless, it's generally accepted that there's no safe level of lead intake. Ideally, we should get contaminant levels down to zero. And look, as a consumer group pointed out, a quarter of the lipsticks were lead-free. I mean, so we know it can be done. So maybe we should better regulate toxic metals and cosmetics to protect women's health in the United States, as has already been done in Europe. Fair enough. The billion-dollar lipstick industry, however, wasn't happy. In an article that tried to downplay the risks, the scientists for hire firm that once played villain in the real-life Aaron Brockovich case concluded that although lipstick may contain lead, the concentrations are so low that they would not be expected to pose any health risks to adults or children. Children's blood lead levels are influenced more by background lead exposure in the air-dust water food than by lipstick exposures. OK, but just because our environment is so contaminated doesn't mean we need to add to the problem. In fact, because there's so much lead around anyway, maybe it's that much more reason to cut down on additional exposures. But they calculate that an adult would need to apply lipstick over 30 times a day to raise their blood lead level to even the most stringent limits and 695 times a day to get blood levels up to more concerning levels. Ah, but this was based on an assumption that lipstick would only have about one part per million lead, or at the extreme end, maybe two or three. But by 2016, about 10 times more lipsticks were tested and they averaged nearly 500 parts per million, with 10% over 1,000, all the way up to 10,000, with more than one out of five exceeding FDA and even Chinese safety limits on lead in cosmetics. Lip gloss was worse than lipstick, orange and pink and more lead than brown, red or purple, and all the really contaminated ones were the cheaper ones under 5 bucks. But wait a second, 10,185 milligrams. That's 10 grams per kilogram, which means the lipstick was 1% pure lead. That means a single application could expose a grown woman to perhaps 12 times the tall of bold daily intake. And if she's interested in having children, then that poses a particular concern as lead accumulates in your bones and may then be released into the bloodstream during pregnancy where it can slip through the placenta or into the breast milk. The good news is that the FDA is considering lowering the maximum allowable lead levels in lipstick from 20 down to 10, something Canada arrived at a decade ago. But without enforcement, I mean, it doesn't matter. I mean, moving the legal limit from 20 down to 10 would just mean that instead of 23% of the lip products exceeding legal levels, 27% would be exceeding legal levels. Right now the limit's 20, but what does it matter if there's still maybe products like these on store shelves?