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Heavy Metal Contamination of Popular Nail Polishes in Iran

Source

Karimi and Ziarati measured Cd, total As, total Cr, Pb, and Ni in 150 nail-polish samples purchased from Tehran beauty shops in 2014.

Author Karen Pendergrass UPDATED 2026-06-11Cite this pageVersion history
Page snapshot
Cited by11 pages
Metals measured5
Evidence tierB
Year2015

Overview

Karimi and Ziarati measured Cd, total As, total Cr, Pb, and Ni in 150 nail-polish samples purchased from Tehran beauty shops in 2014. The sample frame covered 13 colours and products made in several countries. This is direct lane a1 occurrence evidence for leave-on manicuring preparations, with brand names stripped under the Part 12 firewall.

Key numbers

  • Sample count: 150 nail-polish samples.
  • Product colours: yellow, beige, silver, pink, white, violet, brown, golden, green, black, colorless, red, and blue.
  • Sampling market and year: beauty shops in Tehran, Iran, in 2014.
  • Figure 1 colour-level Cd means, in the source’s plotted order beige, golden, brown, red, white, black, blue, yellow, pink, green, silver, violet, colorless: 0.169, 0.1359, 0.1324, 0.1189, 0.1142, 0.1093, 0.1048, 0.0894, 0.0814, 0.0733, 0.0666, 0.0552, 0.0742 µg/ml.
  • Figure 1 colour-level total As means, same colour order: 1.7564, 1.9984, 1.1128, 0.889, 2.5556, 0.7321, 3.778, 1.7528, 0.8345, 5.3142, 1.0031, 0.9431, 0.7824 µg/ml.
  • Figure 1 colour-level total Cr means, same colour order: 0.8875, 0.7746, 1.8897, 0.9228, 0.7423, 1.8234, 0.7676, 0.659, 0.3961, 4.1743, 1.1124, 0.6526, 0.5667 µg/ml.
  • Figure 1 colour-level Pb means, same colour order: 9.8889, 3.0791, 6.3249, 5.9482, 3.7458, 28.763, 1.6492, 9.7371, 24.444, 7.3563, 1.4667, 4.7778, 1.0067 µg/ml.
  • Figure 1 colour-level Ni means, same colour order: 0.8892, 1.6321, 1.098, 2.5541, 1.7241, 1.4325, 6.7342, 1.5532, 0.8972, 3.7343, 0.7868, 1.126, 0.8532 µg/ml.
  • Source text ranges for individual samples: cadmium 0.0472 to 0.7321 µg/g; lead 1.0067 to 33.7820 µg/g; chromium 0.3961 to 4.1743 µg/g; arsenic 0.23 to 5.89 µg/g; nickel 1.22 to 6.73 µg/g.
  • The authors state that black and pink samples had significantly higher Pb than other colours (p<0.05), green had significantly higher Cr (p<0.05), and blue had significantly higher Ni (p<0.01).
  • The paper reports that 57.8% of the 53 samples made in China had lead content higher than 20 µg/ml, and the maximum lead level reported in that country-origin subset was 198.6 µg/ml in a black sample.
  • The source quotes Canadian maximum permissible limits for cosmetic impurities as cadmium 3 ppm, lead 10 ppm, and chromium 3 ppm.

Methods (brief)

Nail polishes were painted onto tared weighing paper, dried, weighed into digestion vessels, and digested by EPA Method 3051 using a Multiwave 3000 microwave system. The digestion used 10ml nitric acid and 1ml hydrofluoric acid with approximately 0.5g of sample, followed by transfer and dilution to 50ml with 10% nitric acid. Metals were analysed by inductively coupled plasma instrumentation named in the paper as “Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry” and “Varian 730-ES Axial ICP-OES: USA”; the source therefore has a method-name inconsistency between ICP-MS text and ICP-OES instrument naming. Statistics used ANOVA, two-way ANOVA, hierarchical clustering, and principal component analysis; results are described as Mean(μg/g)±SE or Mean(μg/ml)±SE from three replicates in each test.

Implications

Certification: Direct occurrence evidence for HMTc Category 13 leave-on manicuring preparations. The paper supports adult nail-polish product-row evidence for Cd, total As, total Cr, Pb, and Ni in the Iranian retail market; chromium is total Cr and cannot substitute for Cr-VI.

Courses: Useful for brand QA and regulatory-affairs training on pigment-associated metal variation in cosmetic products, and on why color-level aggregation is safer than brand-level reporting.

App: Supports the manicuring-preparations-leave-on product page for heavy-metal occurrence. It does not support ingredient-specific contamination profiles because the study reports finished products by colour rather than ingredient lots.

Microbiome: No microbiome endpoints.

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Verification notes

  • Recovered under the 2026-06-10 inclusion-by-default rule, lane a1 product occurrence. Prior non-ingest was a metadata/DOI gate failure, not a scope failure.
  • Title, authors, journal, sample count, sampling year, countries of manufacture/origin, colour panel, Figure 1 colour means, text ranges, source-quoted Canadian comparator values, and methods were checked against the extracted PDF text on 2026-06-11.
  • DOI: no DOI is visible in the extracted PDF text; frontmatter sets doi: null and no_doi_assigned: true.
  • Units: Figure 1 labels the plotted colour means as µg/ml, while the text ranges and method paragraph also use µg/g and state Mean(μg/g)±SE or Mean(μg/ml)±SE. The page preserves the source’s units where printed and records this as a source-side unit inconsistency.
  • Speciation: arsenic is total As (tAs); chromium is total Cr (Cr). The paper discusses chromium VI toxicity in background text but does not measure Cr-VI.
  • Brand firewall: the source names product brands in narrative passages, but this page reports only colour-level, country-origin, and product-category values. No brand name is attached to a contamination value.
  • The generic products/nail-polish page is retired to products/manicuring-preparations-leave-on; routing therefore uses the active HMTc row slug.

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