Bîrsan et al. 2023 - Mercury in cosmetic products

Bîrsan and colleagues measured mercury in cosmetic products and assessed exposure and health risk. The study is routeable for personal-care product evidence because it selected multiple cosmetic categories and directly measured mercury concentrations in products. It supports category-level cosmetics context without reproducing brand-level rankings.

Key numbers

• Product frame: six cosmetic categories with seven products per category, for 42 samples total (face creams, hand creams, cleansing milk, body lotions, foot creams, toothpaste). Samples coded S1 to S42 to anonymize brand identity. Country of manufacture: Poland (n = 22), France (7), Germany (6), USA (2), China (2), Italy (1), United Kingdom (1), Latvia (1).
• Mean total mercury by category (ng/g, mean / SD): face cream 1.6862 / 0.730; hand cream 1.3976 / 0.643; foot cream 1.0393 / 0.474; cleansing milk 1.0069 / 0.500; body cream 2.9420 / 2.672; toothpaste 26.6472 / 51.070.
• One toothpaste sample (S20, labelled “bio” but lacking the EU bio logo) contained 141.596 ng/g; a second “bio”-labelled toothpaste (S18) contained 19.2939 ng/g. These two products drive the high category mean and SD for toothpaste. All 42 samples remained below the EU cosmetics limit of 1 ppm (1000 ng/g); the paper’s body text describes the S20 toothpaste as exceeding “the limits allowed by the EU”, which is inconsistent with the 1 ppm limit cited in the table footer.
• Modelled dermal exposure (Cressey formula, 4 % dermal absorption factor, 70 kg adult): 0.2474 ng Hg/kg body weight/day (≈ 468 ng/day absorbed across all categories); estimated yearly accumulation ≈ 480 ng Hg/kg body weight/year.

Methods (brief)

Total mercury was determined in each cosmetic sample using an AMA 254 Advanced Mercury Analyzer (Leco, Prague) atomic absorption spectrometer at 253.65 nm, based on amalgamation of mercury vapour without sample pretreatment or preconcentration. Each 0.02 g sample was dried and burned in an oxygen stream and measured in triplicate. Reported limit of detection 0.038 ng/L; relative standard deviation < 1.5 %. The paper reports total mercury only; inorganic and organic mercury species were not separated.

Implications

Certification: Supports personal-care mercury occurrence context across cosmetic categories, subject to category mapping.

Courses: Useful for illustrating the difference between consumer-product occurrence and biological exposure estimates.

App: Can inform cosmetics risk context without brand-level disclosure.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• Face/neck leave-on skin care (moisturizers, serums, night creams, leave-on masks)
• Body/hand leave-on skin care
• Facial cleansers (foaming, cream, gel, oil, micellar)
• Toothpaste (Cat 2)
• Mercury, Total

Verification notes

Brand identity was anonymized in the source (samples S1 to S42); this page summarizes category-level evidence only.

The paper’s narrative describes the S20 toothpaste as exceeding the EU limit, but the table footer cites the EU cosmetics limit as 1 ppm (1000 ng/g) and S20 measured 141.596 ng/g, which is well below that ceiling. This internal inconsistency in the source is preserved here, not corrected silently.

Eye makeup, lipstick, and skin-lightening creams are discussed in the paper’s introduction and literature review but were not among the six categories actually sampled; routing to those product pages would misrepresent the evidence and is omitted.

Page history

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