Does your baby smell divine after the luxurious bath with shampoos and baby lotions? Wait a moment and don’t reach out for the baby personal care products without glancing at the labels. You don’t want to expose your babies to harmful parabens, do you?
PCP research study
A new research study states that personal care products or PCP’s as they are called, comprise of the shampoos, lotions etc, which are applied on the tender baby bodies, contain parabens that are potentially harmful substances. The study says that these PCP’s cause harm to the babies and expose them to harmful substances even more than the exposure the adult ladies face because of cosmetic and personal product use.
Kurunthachalam Kannan and Ying Guo confirm that parabens and phthalates are chemical substances that are widely used in many personal care products, children’s toys, and medical devices. The parabens have properties and are utilized as preservatives; on the other hand phthalates are used to hold in moisture.
Phthalates and Parabens
The efforts put in by the researchers state that these substances are shown to bring about health issues in people and animals. They have been known to cause health hassles as increasing chances of asthma, getting breast cancer, and leading to
sperm damage.
The indoor dust and food was shown to expose a person to phthalate to quite an extent but the exposure to parabens was low in these cases. This was a fact noted by Kannan and his team and they focuses their attention to the use of PCP’s.
The research sample
The research team gathered nearly 170 samples of shampoos, makeup, lotions etc. The sample of personal care products also had about 20 baby products. The sample tested positive for six parabens and nine phthalates, though the baby products showed a lower concentration of phthalate but the parabens were commonly found in them.
The exposure of the babies to these potentially harmful products was judged by the daily exposure of the babies’ skin to the parabens. The researchers noted that the toddlers and infants faced two to three times more chances of more exposure to the dangerous substances than the adult women.
Guidelines
We can follow a few guidelines and carefully scrutinize the labels for the presence or phthalates or parabens. The most surprising thing is that the safe “herbal products” have also shown to contain these dangerous chemicals.So look carefully at the labels and pick the ones that have “Paraben –free” scribbled. The research study has been mentioned in the ACS journal Environmental Science and Technology.
