FDA Finds Lead in 400 Lipsticks

Posted on Feb 14, 2012

Flickr / ebbandflo_pomomama (CC-BY-SA)

Here’s a startling, but perhaps not surprising, bit of news for those inclined to put colors on their kissers: The Food and Drug Administration ran some tests on hundreds of lipsticks and found that many made by popular brands such as L’Oreal, Cover Girl and Nars contained a very unsexy ingredient: lead.  —KA

The Washington Post:

Four hundred of the nation’s most popular lipsticks contained trace levels of lead when tested recently by the federal government, confirming similar results of earlier analyses but on a much wider scale and at higher levels than previously detected.

The findings exacerbate an ongoing disagreement between the FDA and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a consumer group that’s been pushing the government for years to set limits for lead levels in lipsticks. The FDA has resisted, insisting that the lead levels detected in two rounds of its own testing, including the most recent one, do not pose safety risks. But the consumer group says the FDA has no scientific basis for its conclusion.

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