Results of a research letter revealed that many personal care products (PCPs), including lotions, perfumes, and soaps, often contain ingredients that can cause allergic contact dermatitis (ACD). Between 1996 and 2016, the prevalence of PCP-related dermatitis more than doubled.
There is no established definition of “natural” by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), leading vendors of natural PCP (NPCP) to freely promote products with this title that may contain allergens and irritants. Accordingly, NPCPs were evaluated in research conducted by Peter A. Young, MPAS, and Haiwen Gui, Department of Dermatology, Stanford University School of Medicine.
“Contact dermatitis can only be prevented by identifying and avoiding causative substances, but patients may find avoidance difficult due to complex ingredient names,” Young and colleagues wrote. “The confusion may be compounded by the fact that NPCP manufacturers frequently list botanical extracts (primary causes of contact dermatitis and photosensitization) by their Latin names.”
Background and research
Investigators analyzed product ingredients from listings of NPCP products sold from January to March 2022 on the websites of 3 popular retail stores: Whole Foods Market, Target and Walgreens. Website scans used filters to place products into clean or natural categories, and those without allergens were excluded.
They defined an allergen as a contact sensitizer from the Contact Allergy Management Program (CAMP) database, and the team cross-referenced each product’s components with 191 allergens in the database.
The researchers also checked both the number of contact allergens for each product found as well as the clinical prevalence of the allergens listed by referring to previous research on ACDS patch testing.
Study results
Of the 1651 NPCPs that met the exclusion criteria for investigators, approximately 1555 were composed of ≥1 contact allergen, and 1478 had ≥1 allergen from the CAMP database list of the 100 most clinically prevalent. They also found that 96 of the 1651 NPCPs contained no contact allergens.
In total, investigators identified 73 unique allergens that appeared on component lists found out of the 1,555 NPCPs, appearing a total of 7,487 times. Some of the allergens identified in the products were fragrances.
One of the researchers’ limitations was the inability to distinguish between PCP and NPCP products regarding allergen use, as retail stores do not have “unnatural” product placement on their sites. website.
“The results suggest that advertising claims that PCPs are natural or clean may not be health or safety predictive with respect to ACD,” they wrote. “This knowledge may allow clinicians to guide consumers toward purchasing decisions that could reduce the prevalence of DKA and conserve healthcare resources.”
The research letter, “Prevalence of Contact Allergens in Natural Skin Care Products from American Commercial Retailers,” was published online at JAMA Dermatology.
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