Nguyen 2016 - trace elements in women’s underwear

Nguyen and Saleh measured extractable inorganic elements in 120 women’s undergarment samples made from cotton, nylon, and polyester. The paper reports concentrations in mg/kg after 5% nitric-acid extraction, not total digestion of the entire textile. Brand names appear in the Methods sample list but are not attached to any contamination values here.

Key numbers

• Sample frame: 120 women’s underwear samples, consisting of 63 cotton, 44 nylon, and 13 polyester garments, manufactured in 14 countries and spanning colors including black, blue, brown, cream, green, grey, khaki, multi-color, navy blue, orange, pink, purple, red, yellow, and white.
• Aluminum: cotton garments ranged from 5 to 652 mg/kg; nylon garments ranged from 11 to 220 mg/kg; polyester garments were all less than 7 mg/kg.
• Iron: cotton garments ranged from 16 to 163 mg/kg; nylon garments ranged from 13 to 22 mg/kg; polyester garments ranged from 2 to 51 mg/kg.
• Zinc: one red cotton sample was reported at 300 mg/kg; nylon garments ranged from 4 to 8 mg/kg; polyester garments ranged from 2 to 65 mg/kg.
• Chromium: cotton garments ranged from 0 to 7 mg/kg; nylon garments reached 118 and 94 mg/kg in black and green colors; polyester garments ranged from 0 to 1 mg/kg. The paper states that 5 samples were above 100 mg/kg, 12 above 50 mg/kg, 21 above 25 mg/kg, 61 above 10 mg/kg, and 21 up to 10 mg/kg.
• Cobalt: cotton garments ranged from 0.01 to 0.19 mg/kg; nylon garments ranged from 0.0 to 28 mg/kg, with red, yellow, and black nylon values as high as 7, 15, and 28 mg/kg; polyester ranged from 0.0 to 0.03 mg/kg.
• Manganese: one black cotton sample was 59 mg/kg; only two samples were higher than 10 mg/kg; cotton averages were 1.1-3.6 mg/kg except black at 11.6 mg/kg; nylon and polyester ranges were 0.4-5.5 mg/kg and 0.2-4.9 mg/kg.
• Arsenic: 4 samples exceeded the 0.2 mg/kg direct-skin-contact comparison level; average concentration ranged from below detection limit to 0.35 mg/kg.
• Lead: 17 samples exceeded the recommended limit, including 7 with more than twice the recommended level; samples with lead concentrations between 1 and 2 mg/kg included 8 samples, mostly cotton. The extracted text does not provide a single full lead range.
• Nickel: 6 samples exceeded the 1 mg/kg limit but were less than 4 mg/kg; average concentration ranged from below detection limit to 1.74 mg/kg.
• Cadmium: one red cotton sample was up to 0.41 mg/kg; four other samples were at 0.1 mg/kg; the remainder were below the 0.1 mg/kg comparison level.

Methods (brief)

Five grams of each sample were shredded and homogenized. In triplicate, 100 mg of fabric was extracted in 10 mL of 5% nitric acid at 85-90 °C for 30 min, filtered, and transferred to ICP-MS autosampler tubes. Quantitative analysis used an Agilent 7500 ICP-MS with ASX 500 autosampler. Reference-material recovery ranged from 89% to 104%. Detection limits were 0.01 mg/kg for Ag, Bi, Cd, Fe, Pb, Ti, and Zn; 0.03 mg/kg for Be, Co, Cu, Mn, Se, Sb, and Sr; 0.05 mg/kg for As, Hg, Mg, and Ni; 0.13 mg/kg for Ba, Ca, Cr, K, Li, Na, and V; and 0.25 mg/kg for Al.

Implications

Certification (HMTc): This source contributes direct-skin-contact textile occurrence context for underwear, routed through the broad fabric-contact product slug because the closed vocabulary has no general underwear row. It should not be pooled with food or menstrual-product rows.

Courses: The paper is useful for distinguishing extractable textile metals from total product digestion and for showing how color, fiber, and manufacturing origin can confound textile comparisons.

App: The source supports a fabric-contact product context note for Cr, Pb, Ni, Cd, Co, Al, Fe, Zn, Mn, and tAs in direct-skin-contact underwear.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• fabric-contact-products-other

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout to /tmp/hmi_row_1581.txt; Methods, Figure 1 narrative, and element-specific Results paragraphs were re-read before writing.
• Identity checks before creation: DOI 10.1080/10934529.2016.1221212, raw handle MFK_nguyen2016, raw SHA-256 f5d5b352b1ba4a9e08ee1c14c90dd50db60b3497d11e6ab3ed711c098b5392d1, and cite key nguyen2016-underwear-trace-elements were searched in wiki/sources/ and evidence files; no existing source page was found.
• Units are preserved as mg/kg; no conversion to ppm was made.
• Speciation: arsenic and mercury are elemental totals from ICP-MS extraction (tAs, tHg); chromium is total Cr, not Cr(VI).
• Brand firewall: brand names listed in the sampling paragraph are omitted from Key numbers and no brand is attached to any value.
• Closed-vocabulary note: no general underwear product slug exists, so products/fabric-contact-products-other is used. period-underwear-reusable-garments was not used because the source is ordinary underwear rather than menstrual/period underwear.

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.