Nourmoradi et al. 2013 — Pb and Cd in lipstick and eye shadow from Isfahan, Iran

Nourmoradi and colleagues quantified lead and cadmium by graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectrometry in 50 cosmetic samples purchased from cosmetic stores in Isfahan, Iran: 35 lipsticks (5 colors × 7 brands) and 15 eye shadows (3 colors × 5 brands). The reported ranges are Pb 0.08–5.2 µg/g and Cd 4.08–60.20 µg/g for lipsticks and Pb 0.85–6.90 µg/g and Cd 1.54–55.59 µg/g for eye shadows on a wet-weight basis. Cadmium content exceeded lead content in both product categories, and the eye shadow range for both metals exceeded the lipstick range. The authors compare results to the FDA cosmetic Pb guidance of 20 µg/g (all samples below) and the Health Canada cosmetic Cd guidance of 3 µg/g (most samples above).

Key numbers

Per-brand mean, min, max, and reported standard deviation from Table 1 (p. 2; µg/g of wet weight; brands are anonymised as 1–7 for lipsticks and 1–5 for eye shadows in the paper itself):

Frequency distribution of Pb concentration across the 50 samples (Table 2, p. 3; % within each class):

Frequency distribution of Cd concentration across the 50 samples (Table 3, p. 3; % within each class):

Per-color summary across the same 50 samples (Table 4, p. 4; µg/g of wet weight):

Reported significance tests (Section 3, p. 2–3): cadmium content higher than lead content in both product categories (P < 0.04); significant between-brand difference in mean lead for lipsticks (P = 0.018) and eye shadows (P = 0.02); significant between-brand difference in mean cadmium for lipsticks (P < 0.03) but not for eye shadows (P > 0.05); the heavy-metal content range was higher in eye shadows than lipsticks (P < 0.001 for Pb and P = 0.04 for Cd); lipsticks with copper color had the highest mean Pb (2.21 µg/g) and Cd (27.20 µg/g) of any color, but the between-color differences were not statistically significant (P > 0.2); eye shadows with golden color had a significantly higher cadmium concentration (P = 0.043) but no significant difference for lead by color (P = 0.92). The detection limit of the GFAAS instrument was 0.1 ppb for both metals.

Regulatory reference values cited by the paper (Section 3, p. 2–3):

All 50 samples are below the FDA 20 µg/g Pb cap; the authors report that most samples exceed the Health Canada 3 µg/g Cd guidance and that 29.4 % of lipsticks and 66.7 % of eye shadows have Cd above 20 µg/g.

Methods (brief)

Cosmetic samples were purchased from large cosmetic stores in Isfahan, Iran. Each sample was prepared by digesting 1 g of product with 5 mL of concentrated nitric acid (Merck, 99.99 %) in a 100 mL Pyrex glass beaker on a hot plate at 80 °C until dry; the digestion was repeated twice. Then 1 mL of concentrated hydrogen peroxide was added to oxidise residual organic matter. The residual material was diluted to 50 mL with deionised water and filtered through a 0.45 µm Whatman filter. Lead and cadmium concentrations in the filtrate were quantified by graphite-furnace atomic absorption spectrometry (GFAAS, Model AAnalyst 300) with a reported detection limit of 0.1 ppb for both metals. Results are reported as µg/g on a wet-weight basis. Statistical analysis used SPSS-16 one-way ANOVA with significance defined at P = 0.05.

Speciation: total Pb and total Cd only; no inorganic-vs-organic speciation step. The paper does not enumerate per-metal LOQ values beyond stating the LOD, does not report recovery from a certified reference material, and does not state digestion-vessel rinse procedure or blank correction explicitly.

Implications

• Certification (HMTc): Direct occurrence evidence for lipstick (35 samples, 5 colors × 7 brands) and eye-makeup (15 eye-shadow samples, 3 colors × 5 brands) as marketed in Isfahan, Iran. The lipstick row currently routes to a retired products/lipstick page (Cat 2 cleanup 2026-05-16) because the underlying papers describe adult lip cosmetics that do not belong in Cat 2 (ages 0–5); adult lipstick is queued for a future Cat 13 (Leave-on Cosmetics, adult) row. Until that row is built, this source contributes to the pooled occurrence dataset that will inform Cat 13 thresholds when the category is scaffolded. The eye-shadow data routes to eye-makeup (Cat 13 Row 7) as direct occurrence evidence. Sample frame is small (n = 35 lipsticks, n = 15 eye shadows) and limited to a single city in a single year; treat as one contributing entry in a multi-source pool rather than a standalone anchor for any threshold.

• Courses: Useful as a teaching case for (a) the divergence among published cosmetic heavy-metal limits (CSC 0.1 µg/g Pb vs FDA 20 µg/g Pb is a 200× spread on the same metal in the same product class), (b) the use of FDA’s candy Pb guideline as a proxy for lipstick (defensibility limits of cross-product extrapolation), and (c) brand-level variability within a single product class measured by GFAAS in a small-n study (per-brand mean Pb in lipsticks varies almost 6× between Brand 3 and Brand 7).

• App: This paper measures finished cosmetic products (lipstick and eye shadow) and does not change any food-ingredient contamination_profile block. If the future Heavy Metal Index app extends to a leave-on cosmetic category, the per-brand and per-color occurrence values from Tables 1 and 4 are direct inputs.

• Microbiome: Not addressed by the paper.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lead
• cadmium
• lipstick
• eye-makeup

Verification notes

• 2026-06-01 fresh ingest (Claude Opus 4.7, autonomous v2.0 manual-fetch skill): NEW path. Three identity checks against wiki/sources/ returned no hits: DOI 10.1155/2013/962727 not present; raw_handle: MFK_nourmoradi2013 not present; cite-key stem nourmoradi2013 not present. PDF SHA-256 13678df35fc79efef88745594462139957480606a7fbd6afb214e297df6bc55e.
• metals: [Pb, Cd] uses total Pb and total Cd. The paper does not perform inorganic-vs-organic speciation and the matrix (cosmetic powder/wax/oil base) is not one where Pb or Cd speciation is conventionally distinguished; the bare Pb and Cd symbols are the correct entries per Part 14 speciation discipline.
• evidence_tier: B rather than A: the paper is peer-reviewed (Hindawi Journal of Environmental and Public Health, Article ID 962727, with Academic Editor David O. Carpenter named) and uses a sound primary analytical method (GFAAS with stated 0.1 ppb LOD). Several methodological items are weaker than the A-tier bar: (a) no recovery from a certified reference material is reported; (b) no LOQ beyond the LOD is enumerated; (c) blank-correction and rinse-protocol detail is not stated; (d) the sample frame is small (n = 35 lipsticks, n = 15 eye shadows) from a single city; (e) per-color sample size is uneven (lipsticks have 5 colors × 7 brands = 35 covering all combinations; eye shadows have 3 colors × 5 brands = 15); (f) the paper carries internal data-integrity inconsistencies catalogued below.
• license: "CC BY": the article’s copyright statement reads “Copyright © 2013 H. Nourmoradi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.” This is recorded as generic CC BY (Hindawi’s 2013 OA articles do not always pin a specific CC BY version in the article footer).
• jurisdictions: [IR]: samples purchased in Isfahan, Iran (Materials and Methods §2.1, p. 2). The paper compares findings to US FDA, US CSC, and Health Canada limits, but those are reference jurisdictions, not sample-source jurisdictions.
• matrices: [cosmetic-personal-care]: established bare-string matrix vocabulary used across cosmetic-occurrence sources (arshad2020, attard2022, bashir2025, almukainzi2022, opss2023, rbeida2023). No exposure-modeling matrix tag because the paper does not compute dermal SED, MoS, HQ, HI, or LCR — it stops at finished-product concentrations and qualitative discussion of swallowing/dermal absorption.
• products: routing rationale:
  • lipstick (currently retired as a Cat 2 row; queued for Cat 13 once built) — direct occurrence evidence for the 35 lipstick samples (Table 1 lipstick rows; Table 4 lipstick rows). Routing to the retired slug is consistent with other adult-lipstick sources already in the corpus (dauda2023, attard2022, li2021) that retain [[products/lipstick]] in their products: array so the future Cat 13 scaffold can pull these source pages in.
  • eye-makeup (Cat 13 Row 7) — direct occurrence evidence for the 15 eye shadow samples (Table 1 eye-shadow rows; Table 4 eye-shadow rows). Eye shadow is the canonical use case the eye-makeup row covers.
• Brand firewall (Part 12, strict reading locked 2026-05-17): the paper itself anonymises brands as numbered codes (Lipstick brands 1–7, Eye shadow brands 1–5) and does not name individual manufacturers in Table 1, Table 4, or anywhere else in the body. No brand-attribution stripping was necessary. Instrument vendor (PerkinElmer AAnalyst 300 GFAAS — the AAnalyst 300 is a PerkinElmer model, though the paper writes only “Model AAnalyst 300” without the vendor name), reagent vendor (Merck for nitric acid; Whatman for filter; Pyrex for digestion beakers), and statistical software (SPSS-16) are scientific-method vendor names retained per Exception 2 of the Part 12 strict reading (locked 2026-05-17).
• Wiki/HMTc firewall (Part 2): the paper’s conclusion advocates that “effort must be made to inform the users and the general public about the harmful consequences of cosmetics.” The wiki page records this as the paper’s own claim without adopting it as the wiki’s voice and without proposing HMTc threshold values. The Implications section frames this source as one contributing entry in a multi-source pool for cosmetic-product occurrence data, not as a standalone anchor for any future Cat 13 threshold.
• Paper-internal inconsistencies catalogued (reproduced verbatim above where possible; documented here for the audit trail):
  • Eye shadow Brand 1 row in Table 1 reports Pb min 4.47, max 6.90, SD 1.22, average 1.55. The reported average is below the reported minimum, which is mathematically impossible. The most likely typo target is an average somewhere in the 5.0–6.0 µg/g region given the min, max, and SD; the table value is reproduced verbatim here without correction.
  • Methods §2.1 (p. 2) names the eye shadow colors as “blue, green, and copper”, but Table 4 (p. 4) labels the three eye shadow colors as “Blue”, “Green”, and “Golden”. Section 3 (p. 3, last paragraph) also refers to “eye shadows with golden color”. The most likely reading is that the methods text contains a “copper / golden” mis-statement (the lipstick set does include a copper color, which may have caused the carry-over). Table 4 and the Section 3 narrative are taken as authoritative for the eye-shadow color set (“Blue”, “Green”, “Golden”) because they are mutually consistent and consistent with the per-color statistical findings.
  • Table 4 Black-brown lipstick Cd min is 1.52 µg/g, but no brand in Table 1 has a lipstick Cd min below 4.08 µg/g (Brand 4). Table 1 reports per-brand min/max aggregated across 5 colors per brand; Table 4 reports per-color min/max aggregated across 7 brands per color. A black-brown sample at 1.52 µg/g would have to belong to some brand whose overall Cd minimum (across that brand’s 5 colors) is 1.52 — but no Table 1 brand row has a Cd min ≤ 4.08. The two tables are therefore inconsistent on at least one sample’s Cd value. The paper does not provide per-sample data to resolve this.
  • The lipstick Cd ranges in Table 4 contain at least two values (Orange max 59.90; Black-brown max 60.20) that are essentially adjacent to the lipstick Cd absolute maximum reported in the Abstract and Section 3 (60.20 µg/g, which matches Brand 7’s Table 1 max). This is internally consistent if the Brand 7 max sample is also a black-brown sample (Brand 7 black-brown could equal both the brand-max and the color-max). The paper does not report per-sample data to confirm.
  • Section 3 (p. 3, last paragraph) says “lipsticks with copper color have maximum levels of lead (2.21 µg/g) and cadmium (27.20 µg/g)” — these are the per-color average values from Table 4 (Copper Pb avg 2.21, Cd avg 27.20), not maxima. The narrative uses “maximum” loosely to mean “highest average”.
  • Reference [22] in the paper cites Khalid et al. lipstick Pb at “87–123 µg/g” (Discussion, p. 3) but reference [22] full citation lists “International Journal of Biology, Pharmacy and Allied Sciences, vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 263–271, 2013”. The 87–123 µg/g range is reproduced from the paper’s narrative; the wiki does not independently verify the cited Khalid et al. value.
• Data availability: no explicit data-availability statement and no supplementary materials linked in the article. Raw per-sample values are not published; only per-brand and per-color min/max/SD/average are tabulated.
• 2013 ingest reflects 2013-vintage analytical practice and 2013-vintage regulatory comparators (the FDA 20 µg/g cosmetic-Pb guidance and the CSC 0.1 µg/g advocacy comparator both predate FDA’s 2022 Final Guidance on Lead in Cosmetic Lip Products of 10 µg/g; that 2022 guidance is not in scope here because the paper is from 2013).

Page history

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