Alamgir et al. 2022 - Heavy metals in unbranded whitening creams from Karachi
Alamgir and colleagues measured lead, nickel, chromium, total arsenic, and copper in 25 unbranded skin-whitening creams sold in Karachi, Pakistan. Lead was the highest-concentration contaminant in the sample set, and every sampled cream exceeded the paper’s cited 1 ppm lead limit for cosmetics. The source is direct occurrence evidence for unbranded whitening-product matrices.
Key numbers
Table I reports concentrations in ppm for 25 skin-whitening cream samples.
| Metal | Mean | Min-max | SD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pb | 4.568 | 2.11-9.12 | 1.847 |
| Ni | 0.546 | 0.12-1.21 | 0.274 |
| Cr | 2.013 | 1.13-2.68 | 0.421 |
| As | 0.022 | 0.005-0.091 | 0.021 |
| Cu | 0.489 | 0.22-0.85 | 0.145 |
The highest lead value was 9.12 ppm and the lowest was 2.11 ppm. Chromium ranged from 1.13 to 2.68 ppm, nickel from 0.12 to 1.21 ppm, arsenic from 0.005 to 0.091 ppm, and copper from 0.22 to 0.85 ppm. The paper orders the mean concentrations as Pb > Cr > Ni > Cu > As.
Methods (brief)
The authors collected 25 unbranded whitening creams from three Karachi markets and stored them at room temperature before analysis. One gram of oven-dried cream was digested with concentrated nitric acid, filtered, diluted to 50 mL with deionized water, and analyzed for Pb, Ni, Cr, As, and Cu using Merck Super Nova60 kits. Each sample was measured in triplicate and reported as means with dispersion statistics.
Implications
Certification: Provides Pakistan-market occurrence data for lead, total chromium, nickel, total arsenic, and copper in unbranded whitening creams. Chromium is total Cr; the source does not speciate hexavalent chromium despite discussing its toxicology.
Courses: Useful for explaining how informal or unregulated cosmetic markets can create dermal exposure to heavy metals.
App: Supports the whitening-products page and consumer-product gap tracking for personal-care matrices.
Wiki pages this source may touch
Verification notes
- The source measures unbranded whitening creams, not named consumer brands.
- Arsenic and chromium are total element measurements; the source does not support inorganic arsenic or Cr(VI) routing.
- Values are preserved in the source’s ppm unit. For these cream matrices, ppm is equivalent to mg/kg when treated as mass fraction.
Page history
The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.
| Commit | Date | Description |
|---|---|---|
| c1aef38 | 2026-06-02 | audit-queue: hamid2021-bacterial-plant-biostimulants-review → audited-promote |