Zafarzadeh et al. 2018 - cadmium and lead in cosmetics sold in Gorgan, Iran

Zafarzadeh and colleagues measured cadmium and lead in 264 cosmetic products purchased in Gorgan, Iran from September 2016 to March 2017. The sample frame covered 11 product types, with 24 samples per type: lipstick, nail polish, eyeliner, eye pencil, eyeshadow, eye makeup remover, mascara, pancake, tattoo, hair dye, and hair gel. The paper reports total Cd and Pb as µg/g after nitric-acid digestion and voltammetric determination; brand identities are coded by letters, so no brand-name stripping was needed.

Key numbers

• Article identity: National Journal of Physiology, Pharmacy and Pharmacology 8(8):1200-1204; DOI 10.5455/njppp.2018.8.0411729042018; received April 07, 2018; accepted April 29, 2018.
• Sample frame: 264 samples total, 24 samples for each of 11 product types, purchased from different shops in Gorgan, Iran between September 2016 and March 2017.
• Overall concentration summary from the abstract and Table-based interpretation: Cd mean ± SE 3.69 ± 0.72 µg/g, range < 0.001 to 15.99 µg/g; Pb mean ± SE 9.07 ± 1.126 µg/g, range 0.68 to 63.42 µg/g. The Results paragraph reverses the Cd/Pb labels for these two summary statistics; see Verification notes.
• Source comparison limits: Cd 3 µg/g and Pb 10 µg/g, cited by the paper as suggested/permitted limits. These are source-side comparators, not HMTc thresholds.
• Product-type means above the source’s Pb comparator: lipstick Pb 15.39 µg/g, tattoo Pb 13.09 µg/g, and nail polish Pb 10.36 µg/g.
• Product-type means above the source’s Cd comparator: eye pencil Cd 5.39 µg/g, lipstick Cd 5.33 µg/g, and tattoo Cd 3.97 µg/g.
• Product-type exceedance proportions reported in the Discussion: Cd exceeded the suggested limit in 18% of lipstick samples, 14% of nail polish samples, and 13% of eye pencil samples; one-third of tattoo samples exceeded the Cd recommendation. Pb exceeded the recommended value in 28% of lipstick samples, 22% of nail polish samples, and 17% of hair dye samples; pancake, hair gel, and makeup cleaner samples had Pb exceedance proportions of 3%, 6%, and 7%.
• Producer-country summary: the mean Cd and Pb concentrations were higher than the paper’s suggested values only for cosmetics produced by China. The paper states that German and French products had Cd and Pb below the permitted limits across the sampled products.
• Statistical tests: Cd differed among cosmetic types (P = 0.038) and Pb differed among cosmetic types (P = 0.013); Cd and Pb also differed by producing country (P < 0.001) and by type of brand (P = 0.038 for Cd and P = 0.013 for Pb). Pb differed by cosmetic color (P < 0.001), while tattoo Cd by color did not (P = 0.08). Cd and Pb in cosmetic products were not significantly correlated (P = 0.071).

Table 1 product/country summaries (Mean (SE), µg/g; brand letters are source-anonymized codes, omitted here):

Methods (brief)

This cross-sectional study purchased 264 cosmetic products from shops in Gorgan, Iran. Product selection considered coworkers’ and friends’ recommendations, price range, and accessible German, French, Turkish, Chinese, and Iranian products. The paper states that 24 samples were collected for each product type.

For digestion, plastic and glass containers were washed, immersed in 10% v/v HNO3 for 24 h, rinsed with deionized water, and dried in clean air. One gram of cosmetic product was transferred to a 100 ml beaker; 5 ml of nitric acid (70%) was added; the beaker was heated on a water bath at around 80°C; acid addition and heating were repeated until white fumes indicated the end of digestion. The cooled solutions were filtered through Whatman no. 45 into a 100 ml calibrated flask and diluted to volume with deionized water.

Cd and Pb were determined by voltammetry using a Metrohm 797 VA Computrace with a hanging mercury drop working electrode, platinum auxiliary electrode, and Ag/AgCl reference electrode. Analytical standards were prepared from 1000 mg/l stock solutions; Cd and Pb concentrations were quantified by linear regression from voltammogram peak heights. Statistics used IBM SPSS Statistics 20 at P < 0.05, with descriptive means/SE, one-way ANOVA for product type, brand, color, and producer country, and Pearson correlation between Cd and Pb.

Speciation: total Cd and total Pb only. No species distinction beyond elemental Cd/Pb is reported.

Implications

Certification (HMTc): This is direct finished-product occurrence evidence for multiple adult cosmetic categories in the Iranian market: eye makeup, nail polish/manicuring preparations, pancake/foundation-type makeup, tattoo dye, hair dye, hair gel, and eye makeup remover. Lipstick is also direct evidence, but the current products/lipstick page is retired pending an adult Cat 13 lip-products row.

Courses: The source is useful for teaching broad cosmetic routing from a mixed-product survey and for handling source-side table/prose inconsistencies without changing units or back-calculating unsupported sample-level values.

App: If adult personal-care product profiles are added later, the Table 1 product/country means and the product-type exceedance proportions can support Iran-market context cards. This source does not affect food ingredient profiles.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• lipstick
• eye-makeup
• manicuring-preparations-leave-on
• makeup-foundation-powders-blush
• facial-cleansers
• tattoo-inks
• permanent-hair-dyes-tints
• leave-on-hair-preparations
• cadmium
• lead

Verification notes

• PDF text was extracted with pdftotext -layout to /tmp/mfk_june8_cosmetics_pb_cd_iran_2018.txt. The title/byline, DOI block, sampling/methods text, Results section, Table 1, Discussion, Conclusion, and citation block were checked against this page.
• DOI 10.5455/njppp.2018.8.0411729042018, title text, raw handle MFK_assessment-of-cadmium-and-lead-concentrations-in, raw SHA-256 7d31ce0dd58beb41b69e8869074a5e7922b9d6b9a6ad2596415adccd6b74b04a, and candidate cite-key zafarzadeh2018-cosmetics-lead-cadmium-iran were searched before creation; no existing source page was found.
• Units are copied exactly as µg/g; no conversion to ppm, mg/kg, or ppb was performed. The paper uses μg/g and µg/g glyphs interchangeably in the extracted text.
• The Results paragraph prints “mean and SE concentration of Cd and Pb were 9.07 ± 1.126 … and 3.69 ± 0.72 … respectively,” but the abstract states Cd 3.69 ± 0.72 and Pb 9.07 ± 1.126, and the product-type/table values confirm Pb is the higher overall mean. This page follows the abstract/Table-consistent assignment and records the Results sentence as a source-side transposition.
• Figure caption/text mismatch: the narrative refers to product-type Pb means as Figure 1 and Cd means as Figure 2, while the extracted captions label Figure 1 as cadmium and Figure 2 as lead. The numeric product-type means are taken from the surrounding prose rather than reconstructed from the figures.
• Source-internal inconsistency: the Discussion reports highest Pb concentrations as 63.42, 52.19, and 48.75 μg/g for selected product/country/color examples, while the color paragraph later gives dark-red Pb as 52.19-47.75 μg/g. Because the per-sample table is not published, this page avoids using those disputed individual maxima beyond the overall Pb max 63.42 µg/g and the Table 1 group means.
• Brand firewall: Table 1 uses anonymized brand letters only; no consumer brand names are printed in the extracted table. This page omits even the letter-coded brand column and reports only product/country rows and aggregate source findings.
• Evidence tier: B because the paper is peer-reviewed and reports a primary 264-sample analytical survey, but the journal/method detail does not meet A-tier expectations. The paper does not report CRM recovery, blanks, LOD/LOQ values in finished-product units, or per-sample raw data; it also contains several source-side transposition/caption inconsistencies.
• Routing: all product slugs used in frontmatter appear in docs/gpt-collaboration/taxonomy-snapshot.md. Missing exact slugs: the snapshot has no non-retired adult lip-products page despite a planned product-index row, no eye-makeup-remover slug, and no explicit pancake-makeup slug. The page uses lipstick for exact closed-vocabulary continuity, facial-cleansers for eye makeup remover, and makeup-foundation-powders-blush for pancake makeup.
• Speciation: Cd and Pb are elemental total-metal measurements only; no cadmium/lead species distinction is reported.

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.