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Heavy Metal Index

EN 1811 Nickel Release Testing

Testing method

EN 1811 is the nickel-release method discussed in LGC 2003 for products intended to come into direct and prolonged contact with the skin.

Overview

EN 1811 is the nickel-release method discussed in LGC 2003 for products intended to come into direct and prolonged contact with the skin. In the report’s description, the article is placed in artificial sweat test solution for one week, and dissolved nickel is measured and expressed as µg/cm2/week.

Method Features Preserved

FeatureSource-grounded description
Target analyteNickel released from an article into the test solution.
Reported unitµg/cm2/week.
Simulant in EN 1811Artificial sweat.
Exposure timeOne week.
Analytical instruments namedAtomic absorption spectrometry, inductively coupled plasma spectrometry, and other appropriate analytical methodology.
LGC 2003 deviationBlood plasma and urine were also used as test solutions to model piercing-post conditions during epithelization.
LGC 2003 low-level methodHR-ICP-MS was used to reach lower detection limits.

Relation To Nickel Directive Values

ValueContext
0.5 µg/cm2/weekRelease-rate comparator for products in direct and prolonged skin contact, as described in EU Nickel Directive 94/27/EC.
0.2 µg/cm2/weekLGC 2003 recommended migration limit for all piercing post assemblies when tested under EN 1811.

Category 1 Boundary

EN 1811 is not a food analytical method and does not report ppb concentrations in food. It can support nickel route-specific context and contact-material regulation pages, but it cannot directly populate Category 1 infant/child food occurrence cells.

References

Works cited in this page’s text, in first-appearance order. This is not the full corpus for this page; it is only what the prose above draws on. The complete set of sources is listed under Sources below. Each title links to its source record, which carries the ingest receipt, the extracted values, and the file hash of the document it was built from.

  1. Risk of sensitisation of humans to nickel by piercing post assembliesLGC Limited · Final Report submitted under EC Contract ETD/FIF.2001592 · 2003Government

Update history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page, classified major (evidence or structure moved), correction (a published value or statement was wrong and has been fixed), or minor (narrative rewritten without changing the underlying evidence). Each description is derived from what the edit did to this page; the linked commit is the authoritative record, routine regeneration passes are excluded, and 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.

CommitDateChangeDescription
a8052bb2026-08-09major1 source added; 6 sections added; narrative text revised