Lead? In *my* toothpaste??

Tue 22 April 2025

The News

I came across this news article from gizmodo that reminded me of the previous girl scout cookie news I'd heard. It's an independent study of toothpastes showing a lot of heavy metal contamination, especially of lead, in kids' products. Since I had some numbers handy from the EU food regulations, I wanted to do a sanity check. I'm glad I did, too. My instinct was "oh this is probably bullshit like the cookies thing was", but I ended up feeling much more simpatico with the people behind this study, as it is not being obviously motivated/coopted for a lawsuit.

The Data

original pdf, and a link to the data here.

basically, it's a table sorted into a few chunks. No lead, between 5 and 100 ppb, 100-200 ppb, 200-300 ppb, and >1000 ppb.

An Analysis

Now, given:

• EU regs allow 200 ppb
• you don't swallow toothpaste so the lead is less bioavailable
• you consume way less toothpaste than food

So the food threshold of 200 ppb is a good quick comparison point for whether we need to worry.

Further, gizmodo point out WA state cosmetic¹ laws allowing for up to 1000 ppb of lead, and the cosmeticsdesign website shows Germany allows 2.0 mg/kg, or 2000 ppb of lead. With the WA state regulatory threshold in mind, only 3 toothpastes are concerning:

• Redmond Earthpaste Natural Toothpaste w Silver (3,500.0 ppb)
• VanMan’s Miracle Tooth Powder (4,258.4 ppb)
• Primal Life Dirty Mouth Kids Tooth Powder (7,800.0 ppb).

2 of those measurements are a multiple of 100, which is quite suspicious--the testing is accurate to the decimal in measuring parts per billion, and measures exactly 7,800.0? This could point to errors in accuracy or reporting of testing data. The other thing to note is they're all 3 "natural" products. They all have naturally harvested clay, bone, and other ingredients.

A conclusion

I'm not really worried about the lead in my toothpaste. We should always strive for less lead in products, and I like leadfreemama's general purpose: crowdfunding 3rd party testing of products to bully manufacturers into poisoning us less is dope, actually. Fuck colgate. All my homies hate colgate. But here, we see tests showing that unless you pay too much for all-natural hippy-ass-toothpaste, you're not exposing yourself to enough lead to worry about. I think we should let these test data encourage us to look elsewhere for things to prioritize.

Tags:

• analysis