Campaign for Safe Cosmetics 2007 - lead in 33 red lipsticks

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics commissioned Bodycote Testing Group to measure lead in 33 unopened red lipsticks purchased from U.S. retail stores in four cities in August 2007. The report found detectable lead in 61 percent of tested lipsticks, with source-reported concentrations ranging from 0.03 to 0.65 parts per million (ppm), while 13 lipsticks were below the 0.02 ppm laboratory detection limit. The report is a nonprofit advocacy publication with an independent ISO 17025 laboratory, a small convenience sample, incomplete dissolution in some samples, and an average spike recovery of 53 percent; use it as B-tier occurrence/context evidence rather than as a representative U.S. market distribution.

Key numbers

• Sample frame: 33 unopened red lipsticks purchased in August 2007 in Boston, Hartford, Minneapolis, and San Francisco from local drug stores, big-box discount chains, high-end cosmetics shops, and department stores.
• Overall detection summary: 61 percent of the 33 lipsticks contained detectable lead; detectable concentrations ranged from 0.03 to 0.65 parts per million (ppm).
• Non-detect group, Appendix A: 13 of 33 lipsticks had lead <0.02 parts per million, the lowest level detectable by the lab.
• Detectable but below the report’s FDA-candy comparator, Appendix A: 9 of 33 lipsticks had lead values below 0.1 ppm; the values listed were 0.03, 0.03, 0.03, 0.03, 0.04, 0.06, 0.06, 0.09, and 0.09 ppm.
• Above the report’s FDA-candy comparator, Appendix A: 11 of 33 lipsticks had lead levels higher than 0.1 ppm; the values listed were 0.11, 0.12, 0.12, 0.18, 0.19, 0.21, 0.28, 0.50, 0.56, 0.58, and 0.65 ppm.
• The report states that one-third of tested lipsticks exceeded the U.S. FDA 0.1 ppm recommended maximum for lead in candy, a comparator the report uses because lipstick can be ingested. This is a source-side comparator, not an HMTc threshold.
• Matched-product variability: the report says repeated purchases of the same brand/color in different cities showed little difference for four matched sets, but two matched sets differed by 0.15 ppm and 0.44 ppm; four tubes of one same brand/color spanned 0.12, 0.18, 0.27, and 0.56 ppm.
• Regulatory context quoted by the report: the FDA had no finished-product lead standard for lipstick at the time, while FD&C color-additive lead limits were stated as 10 to 20 ppm on a colorant basis and colorants were described as being used around the 1 percent range in highly colored products.

Methods (brief)

Campaign for Safe Cosmetics members purchased red lipsticks from retail stores in four U.S. cities during August 2007 and sent 33 unopened products to Bodycote Testing Group in Santa Fe Springs, California. The report states that the laboratory was ISO 17025-accredited and used inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry for quantitative lead analysis. For each sample, 0.5 grams were extracted with sulfuric and nitric acid. The report gives a detection limit of 0.02 ppm, notes that some samples did not completely dissolve, and reports that spike recovery averaged 53 percent.

The public report does not provide per-sample replicate results, blanks, uncertainty intervals, or a laboratory report appendix beyond the product-result table. It explicitly cautions that the 33 lipsticks may or may not represent the entire lipstick market and that lead levels are not consistent by brand, shade, or state of purchase.

Implications

Certification (HMTc): This source supplies finished-product Pb occurrence context for adult lipstick on a ppm basis, but the sample is purposive and small. It should not be used to infer a representative U.S. lipstick percentile distribution.

Courses: The report is useful for teaching the difference between finished-product cosmetic occurrence data, color-additive limits, and food comparators. It also shows why the brand firewall matters: the published appendix is brand-by-brand, but the wiki can preserve the concentration distribution without reproducing a consumer brand ranking.

App: If the app later includes adult leave-on cosmetics, this source can support a lipstick context card noting the 2007 U.S. nonprofit screen, the <0.02 to 0.65 ppm Pb range, and the laboratory/QC caveats.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lipstick
• lead

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout to /tmp/mfk_june8_a_poison_kiss.txt. The title page, overview, “How we tested for lead in lipstick” section, Appendix A, and references were checked against this page.
• No DOI is printed in the extracted report. Title text, raw handle MFK_a-poison-kiss-the-problem-of-lead-in-lipstick, raw SHA-256 dca80651bdcb7af1ad8a0d4f387464431ecbcf1466b8a2c606a4f6f2e1421fd0, and candidate cite-key campaignsafecosmetics2007-lead-lipstick were searched before creation; no existing source page was found.
• Units are copied exactly from the source as parts per million (ppm). No conversion to mg/kg or ppb was performed.
• Speciation: the source measures elemental lead only (Pb). It does not report cadmium, arsenic, mercury, chromium, or nickel for this lipstick screen.
• Brand firewall: Appendix A names brands, shade names, parent companies, states, dates, and Pb values. This page intentionally reports only category-level counts, ranges, and de-identified value lists; no brand or shade name is attached to a contamination value.
• Evidence tier: B because this is a nonprofit-commissioned third-party laboratory screen using an ISO 17025-accredited lab, but it is not peer-reviewed and the sample is a small convenience set. The source’s own methods caveats are material: some samples did not completely dissolve and spike recovery averaged 53 percent, so the reported values should be treated as lower-confidence occurrence evidence.
• Routing note: products/lipstick exists in the closed taxonomy snapshot but the current wiki page is retired pending a future adult Cat 13 lip-cosmetics row. The exact source matrix is adult lipstick; this page keeps the closed-vocabulary lipstick product slug and records the Cat 13 gap here so a later taxonomy pass can reroute it if a non-retired adult lip-cosmetics page is added.

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.