Background: Significantly high levels of benzene in certain personal care products

What’s the big deal about a little bit of benzene in your personal care product? Another study has confirmed the presence of significantly higher n (up to 17.5x higher) than permissible levels of benzene in specific lots of commercially available acne products containing benzoyl peroxide.  This study was done by the same lab Valisure that found benzene contamination issues with specific brands of dry shampoos, hand sanitizers and sunscreens. However, unlike the criticized previous iteration of the benzoyl peroxide study, this version was also conducted with oversight from professors at Yale and Long Island University and appears in a peer-reviewed Journal of Investigative Dermatology.  It also found these levels in products that were stored at room temperature.

Critics of the Valisure Benzene Studies.

One of the initial criticisms of the initial Valisure benzoyl peroxide study was their decision to expose the products to very high temperatures at roughly 70 degrees C.  People argued that this did not reflect a realistic storage temperature for the products and thus made their findings irrelevant to typical use.  We agreed this was an unusual choice and it would have made more sense to use a more commonplace temperature used in standard accelerated temperature studies that we use for product shelf life testing.  Typically, products are put in incubators at 38 degrees Celsius for anywhere from 3-6 months.  The higher temperatures act as a stand in for time, so something as short as 3 months can give an indication of what a product might be like after two years if stored at room temperature.  If the products had been tested upon initial purchase for benzene in order to give a baseline result and then seen what were the results after a defined period of exposure to accelerated temperatures, we could have begun to understand if this was truly a degradation of the active ingredient over time or one or more of the product’s ingredients were contaminated somewhere along their supply chain.

What are the most common ways we are exposed to benzene daily?

So what’s our take? Benzene exposure comes into our every day life via things like air pollution, gas fumes from your car , vaping etc. It is a definite human carcinogen and scientists who handle benzene in a lab setting wear full protective PPE and only handle it under a fully ventilated gas hood.  Is a little bit of benzene via our topical personal care products a big deal?  The fact is that benzene in our skincare and other personal care products comes via either a contaminated ingredient or because an ingredient is degrading over the course of the product’s shelf life.

Is a little bit of benzene in your skincare bad? How should consumers react?

It’s quite reasonable for consumers to expect the personal care industry to figure out what the source of benzene is in products.  It’s quite reasonable for consumers to ask that commercially available products not have levels exceeding FDA limits.  Currently, there is no definitive answer as to what is causing the issue.  The FDA has said to manufacturers, especially OTC drug ones like those who make sunscreens, to look at their full product’s quality control and investigate possible sources of contamination or degradation and to potentially start testing for benzene if warranted.  Our internal expertise thinks it’s reasonable to assume that cyclical hydrocarbons that have benzene as part of their chemical make-up are a good place to start.  This means that ingredients like Oxybenzone and Avobenzone or benzoyl peroxide or preservatives like sodium benzoate that are formed by linked benzene rings should make investigative testing for benzene a  priority.  Poor quality alcohol used in hand sanitizers and other spray-based personal care products could also be potentially contaminated. Both the FDA and this NIH study also underscore that “The consumer products industry likely has many points of vulnerability to benzene contamination, including aerosol propellants or other petroleum industry-derived inactive ingredients, gelling agents like carbomers, and potentially from unlabeled ingredients that the ingredient “fragrance” comprises”.

Conclusion: our responsibilities as an industry

What should not happen is for consumers to be told that they shouldn’t care or it’s not a big deal.  We should not be asking consumers to constantly lower their expectations. Benzene does not have to be this forever enigma that we will never fully understand.  It seems like an issue that with only a little bit of good will, the industry could resolve quite easily. The FDA is undertaking their own testing to rule in what is the definitive cause of benzene contamination. They have already set clear limits for what level of benzene in skincare products is acceptable for a No Adverse Event Limit. It’s true that nothing is pure in life, but we can be reasonably expected as an industry to understand the cause of this issue and put effective quality controls in place to trace and limit harmful contaminants.

Our company does not use petroleum by-product based UV filters or inactives, aerosol propellants or fragrances in our sunscreens or skincare. However, our quality control team and research team routinely keep abreast of the latest updates with this issue and will update our quality programs as needed and as the science evolves.

Hudspeth A, Zenzola N, Kucera K, Wu Q, Light D. Independent Sun Care Product Screening for Benzene Contamination. Environ Health Perspect. 2022 Mar;130(3):37701. doi: 10.1289/EHP10386. Epub 2022 Mar 29. PMID: 35349356; PMCID: PMC8963516.