JEDDAH, 2 May 2007 — The Canadian Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association (CCTFA) have officially dispelled an e-mail that has been causing worldwide concern with claims that popular brand name cosmetic companies such as Christian Dior, Lancôme, Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent have lowered their prices due to the alleged presence of cancer-causing lead.
The e-mail has been in circulation since May 2003 offering a test that consumers can do to check for the presence of lead in their lipstick. The e-mail states that if lipstick is rubbed on the hand and scratched with a gold ring, then the presence of lead would become apparent from the change in the normal color to that of black. The e-mail then instructed its readers to send the information immediately to “the females they care about.”
To make the cancer-scare appear more credible, the warning is alleged to have been sent by Dr. Nahid Neman, who is supposedly a physician in the Breast Cancer Unit of Mt. Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada. The e-mail cautions that Yves Saint Laurent was found, according to tests, to contain the highest amount of lead and is therefore the most hazardous to use.
Debunking the email and labeling it a hoax, CCTFA stated: “Dr. Nahid Neman, in fact, does not exist and the association’s highest priority is to ensure the safety of cosmetics and the personal care industry as well as the health of consumers.”
CCTFA added that lead and its compounds are listed on the hot list of Health Canada — the country’s governmental health agency — and are strictly prohibited in lipsticks and cosmetics in the country. However, other cosmetic manufacturing nations have been found to permit the use of lead in their products. The FDA, responsible for the regulations of cosmetics in the United States, permits “a minute amount” with the legal limit set at 20 parts per million. The European Union’s cosmetic directive, which is responsible for specifying which ingredients may be used and their levels in EU countries, also allow “trace amounts of lead.”
The Cosmetic Toiletry and Fragrance Association of New Zealand writes on its website: “It is impossible to live in a lead-free world. Lead is ubiquitous in the environment. It is in the air, water, soil, in short, it is unavoidable. However, compared to the amount of lead a person would ingest from eating and drinking ordinary foods, the amount expected from the use of cosmetics would be extremely small.”
Dr. Abdel Aziz Al-Shahid, a Dermatologist in Jeddah, told Arab News that he does not agree with even the smallest amounts of lead being permitted as ingredients in cosmetics due to the lasting and serious effects that can occur from exposure to it.
“If cosmetics, which contain lead, are used daily they can eventually contribute to lead toxicity in the skin,” he said.
“Lead hasn’t been proven to cause cancer but has been blamed for many neurological conditions due to its ability to mimic other nutrients and be stored up in the body. Its presence is very dangerous and I put a portion of the blame on the media for its promotion of cosmetics and contribution to its use,” he concluded.
In addition, lead has been found to cause other symptoms such as reduced IQ, nausea, headache, hyperactivity in children, insomnia and abdominal pain, and in extreme cases seizures and even coma. Early lead exposure and extreme learning disabilities has been concluded in numerous studies. One such example is a study performed by Ezra Susser and his colleagues at Columbia University in New York in which he followed 12,000 children born in Oakland, California, between 1959 and 1966. Susser took blood samples of the children’s pregnant mothers, which were frozen and later analyzed. He found that children exposed to high levels of lead in the womb were more than twice likely to develop schizophrenia in their adult lives. The research was presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle, Washington.
When Arab News spoke with Ghrafran, a 20-year-old Saudi university student and daily user of Yves Saint Laurent cosmetics, about the findings, she said, “ I feel that e-mails like these are just stirring up panic that is unnecessary and that when a real health issue is announced these types of e-mails will make the public not believe them. I also think that government agencies that allow lead and other poisons, even in small amounts, shouldn’t be trusted because in reality they are slowly poisoning the world.”
