It’s time for Halloween! Good parents everywhere have prepared plans for safe trick-or-treating. They’ve purchased fire resistant costumes and secured glowing bracelets and flashlights for their children. But before getting their kids ready for trick-or-treating Saturday, they may want to think twice about using face paints. According to a study by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, every one of the face paints that they tested contained lead, and many of them also contained other heavy metals.
In the face paint study, all ten of the children’s face paints that were tested contained some lead. Lead contaminates cosmetics when low-quality ingredients are used to manufacture the cosmetics. In addition to lead, four of the paints contained nickel, two contained cobalt, and five contained chromium. One of the paints contained 120 ppm of chromium, while the industry-recommended standard limit is 5 ppm.
So careful parents can avoid the risk by being sure to avoid getting the paints near their children’s mouths? That’s no solution. Lead and the other metal contaminants can be absorbed through the skin. Think you’ll skip the paint and just use lipstick? When the same group tested 33 brand-name lipsticks, half the lipsticks contained lead. The FDA also tested 20 lipsticks and found lead in all 20.
So what can health-conscious parents do? The campaign for safe cosmetics has several suggestions for making your own face paint with food-grade ingredients. Another solution is to select costumes that don’t require face paints.
For a summary of the report, click here.
A very detailed and long full report on the face paints is also available for download from that site.
For another summary click here.
For the FDA lipstick report as well as the FDA’s views on cosmetics, click here.
Comments
I am a professional face painter of over two years. I have used some of the types of face paints mentioned in this article, and consider myself, and my company to be extremely diligent at maintaining the very best of the industies high standards and practices. If you read the article by CSC, please note that the group's real gripe seems to be with the FDA. They're not actually claiming that the face paints in question do not meet FDA standards; they're claiming that the FDA doesn't go far enough to regulate the cosmetics industry as a whole. Well, you can take that up with the FDA if you like, but the bottom line, very simply, is that professional cosmetic-grade face paints are perfectly safe for use on you and your kids. As for most of my supplies, also cited in the article, you can find the Mehron MSDS and the Wolfe FX MSDS sheets on a simple googe search. Of which all of the lead contaminants are 1 SIXTIETH of the FDA allowable.
A concerned Ct Professional Face Painter,
Gina J.
This article is based upon a flawed study. Please see responses to the article, together with links to official responses and general face paint safety information. They are at my blog, which is the name above, at blogspot. There are three separate posts regarding these issues, with great links to the real information.
According to the FDA article, they do not intend to regulate heavy metal content of face paint any more than they are currently doing. On of the aspects I find concerning is that one of these paints was labeled "hypoallergenic" and safe. My suggestion is the cosmetic industry set its own standards, with some sort of approval label to be used only by those paints that meet regulations. This would reward those companies, and professional face painters, that are actually producing and using safe products.
(By the way, the idea that the lead content of lipstick is unimportant is ridiculous.)
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