The Potentially Damaging Ingredient That’s Lurking in Your Bathroom

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If you use any variation of shampoo, lotion, hand soap, and body wash, a carcinogen called 1,4-dioxane could unknowingly be part of your beauty routine. The chemical is a solvent that activates ingredients in many foaming bath and beauty products. Most only carry a tiny amount of it, but a report by Environmental Working Group (EWG) estimates that there are at least 8,000 products containing the harmful ingredient on the U.S. market today. In 2008, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) found dioxane was present in 46% of bath and body products.

The tricky part lies in the fact that 1,4-dioxane is a byproduct of chemical reactions that often occur in the production process. Manufacturers then don’t bother to remove it, so it becomes part and parcel of the finished product. What’s even more troubling is that not all companies are required to disclose 1,4-dioxane as an ingredient because it’s considered to be chemical waste.

According to the CDC, dioxane evaporates before it’s absorbed by the skin, so the real danger is the contamination of the water supply. Most communities recycle wastewater—meaning that when you wash a product off in the shower, the water goes down the drain and gets filtered at your local sewage plant. The issue is that the municipal filters do not remove dioxane, so the chemical remains in the water system. The FDA had previously stated that a small amount was not harmful, but a recent study by the CDC found that 71% of the water on New York’s Long Island is contaminated with the chemical. The national American average is 6.9%. In the ’70s, the FDA did a series of experiments exposing animals to 1,4-dioxane and found that consuming it was far more dangerous than applying it to the skin.

Dioxane has a relatively low risk of causing cancer, but the high levels of contamination in U.S. drinking water have alarmed New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand enough to petition the FDA to ban the chemical from all consumer products. “The fact that 1,4 Dioxane, a potentially dangerous chemical, is hiding out in everyday products expected to make us clean is very disturbing, and to make matters worse, likely carcinogens like this one can be even more harmful to kids,” outlined Schumer in a statement.

In addition to supporting Senators Schumer and Gillibrand’s appeal, the best way for consumers to stay safe from dioxane for now, is to avoid beauty products that list ingredients like polyethylene, polyethylene glycol, and polyoxyethylene on the label. Another key tip is to stay away from scented products, or those that simply list “fragrance” as an ingredient. A largely unregulated generic term, “fragrance” is often used by beauty manufacturers to mask other more unpleasant sounding ingredients—like dioxane.

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