Easy Wins · 17 · Personal Care
What's actually in your kid's diaper balm, your eyeliner, and grandpa's hair dye?
I went looking for the worst lead numbers in any consumer product anywhere in the United States. They are not in food. They are not in salt. They are not in cookware. They are in personal care, specifically, in imported eye cosmetics and a handful of cultural folk remedies that the CDC has been writing alerts about since the 1980s.
Pure Earth pulled 56 kohl/kajal/surma samples off the US market in a 2024 study and found two of them at 290,000 and 320,000 ppm lead, that's 29% and 32% lead by weight. The FDA limit for cosmetics is 10 ppm. These products were 30,000× over the limit, sold openly online, sometimes labeled "lead-free."
Meanwhile, the boring white tube of Desitin? Mostly fine. Aquaphor? Fine. The pattern is the same as toothpaste: branded conventional drugstore stuff is clean. The exotic, imported, "natural," or hand-mixed stuff is where the lead lives. Here's the data, source by source, with the numbers I pulled myself.
- Worst kohl tested
- 32% Pb
- Greta / azarcon
- up to 90%
- FDA lipstick avg
- 1.11 ppm
- Boring zinc oxide
- low / clean
Pure Earth 2024 kohl study (n=56); CDC MMWR cultural-remedy series 1981–present; FDA 2007/2010 lipstick surveys (n=420 total); FDA 2018 lead-acetate hair dye repeal.
Boring drugstore = clean. Imported eye cosmetics and folk remedies = the worst lead numbers in any consumer category.
Diaper rash: Boudreaux's Butt Paste, Desitin, Triple Paste, Aquaphor, Vaseline, all low-risk for the lead question. (Tamara Rubin's 2025 Desitin Daily Defense report found ~1,200 ppb lead, which is detectable but a fraction of the cultural-remedy numbers below.)
Lipstick: FDA's 2010 survey of 400 lip products averaged 1.11 ppm lead, max 7.19 ppm. That's a real number, but it's a face product applied in mg quantities, not the dose driver. The danger zone is hand-poured Etsy "natural" lipsticks: a Moroccan Aker Fassi clay-pot lipstick from Etsy tested at 54 ppm.
The actual emergencies in this category: kohl / kajal / surma eyeliner (FDA Import Alert 53-13, Pure Earth 2024 found samples up to 32% lead by weight), greta / azarcon / pay-loo-ah / ghasard / ba-baw-san folk remedies (CDC MMWR documented up to 90% lead by weight), and pre-2018 Grecian Formula / Youthair hair darkening products with 0.6% lead acetate.
If you have any of those four categories in your house, the action is "throw it out tonight." Not "use less." Not "be careful." Throw it out.
The data
Personal care, ranked by documented lead concentration.
I pulled this from FDA Import Alert 53-13, the FDA cosmetic surveys from 2007 and 2010, the Pure Earth 2024 kohl study, the CDC MMWR cultural-remedy series, and Lead Safe Mama's published lab reports. Real numbers in the ppm or % column. Where I couldn't find a number, I marked it.
FDA cosmetic lead limit = 10 ppm (proposed; current de facto enforcement). Washington State Toxic-Free Cosmetic Act (Jan 2025) = 1 ppm. Sources cited inline above. "Not in our records" means I haven't found a published independent ICP-MS report, not a clean bill of health.
The math: a child's eye at 32% lead.
The dose calculation that matters most isn't lipstick. Lipstick is roughly 0.04 g per application, applied to the lip, a small fraction of the dose ever ends up swallowed. Even at the FDA 2010 maximum of 7.19 ppm, that's a low-µg exposure per application, and most of it never enters the body.
Kohl is different. It's applied to the eye line, the conjunctival mucosa is one of the most absorptive tissues on the body for water-soluble metal salts. A traditional kohl application uses 5–20 mg of powder placed in direct contact with mucosa. At 32% lead by weight, that's 1,600–6,400 µg of lead in direct mucosal contact per application. Per day, in some cultural traditions, on babies. The FDA child IRL is 2.2 µg/day. The math here isn't a comparison; it's an emergency.
Pre-2018 Grecian Formula at 0.6% lead acetate is the same story for adult scalp absorption: lead acetate is water-soluble, unlike most lead compounds, which makes it dramatically more bioavailable through skin and mucous membranes. The FDA repealed the color-additive listing in 2018 (effective 2022 after a depletion period) precisely because there is no longer a reasonable certainty of no harm at any level of adult lead exposure.
The chemistry
Why imported eye cosmetics and folk remedies are the worst lead in any consumer category.
Three reasons, all chemical, all mundane.
One: lead sulfide (PbS, galena) is a traditional cosmetic pigment. It's the black mineral that's been used as eyeliner across the Mediterranean, Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia for at least 3,000 years. In the historical record it's literally an ingredient by design, not a contaminant. The traditional kohl ratio in some regional formulations is north of 50% PbS by weight. That's why the FDA Import Alert exists: products labeled kohl, kajal, surma, al-kahal, tiro, tozali, kwalli are presumed to contain lead until proven otherwise, and may be detained without inspection at the border. The "lead-free" label on these products has been demonstrated to be unreliable, Pure Earth's 2024 study found that more than half of the products labeled "lead-free" still tested positive, some at over 38% lead.
Two: lead salts are pharmacologically active. The traditional indications for greta (PbO, lead monoxide) and azarcon (Pb₃O₄, red lead) include "empacho", a folk-medicine syndrome of stomach/intestinal blockage that is treated, ironically, with lead's known constipating action on smooth muscle. The Pearson J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1963 hard-soft-acid-base framework explains why: Pb²⁺ is a borderline soft Lewis acid that binds tightly to thiol groups on smooth muscle proteins, slowing peristalsis. The remedy works, in the short term. It also poisons the child administering it. CDC MMWR has documented this since the early 1980s.
Three: lead acetate is water-soluble, making it uniquely dermally bioavailable. Most lead compounds, sulfides, oxides, carbonates, are not appreciably water-soluble and therefore have low transdermal absorption. Lead acetate is the exception: Pb(CH₃COO)₂ dissolves readily and ionizes, which is why it works as a "progressive" hair darkener (the lead ions react with sulfur in keratin to form dark PbS in situ, gradually). This same solubility is why the FDA's 2018 final rule pulled the color-additive listing for lead acetate in cosmetics. Any pre-2022 bottle of Grecian Formula or Youthair in your bathroom predates that final action and contains the active ingredient at up to 0.6%.
The three easy wins
What to do tonight.
01
Audit the four emergency categories. Throw out anything you find.
Walk into your bathroom. Open every drawer and shelf. Look for: (a) any black or dark-grey eyeliner powder labeled kohl, kajal, surma, al-kahal, tiro, tozali, or kwalli; (b) any imported folk remedy by the names greta, azarcon, rueda, pay-loo-ah, bala, bala goli, ghasard, kandu, ba-baw-san; (c) any "progressive" or "gradual gray coverage" hair darkening product made before 2022, especially Grecian Formula or Youthair; (d) hand-poured "natural" lipstick or balm from Etsy / artisan markets / non-FDA sources, especially anything in a clay pot or cardboard tube. Throw all four out tonight. Don't pass them down. Don't donate them. The trash is the right move.
02
For diaper rash, lipstick, lotion, sunscreen, buy boring drugstore from a major US chain.
Diaper rash: Boudreaux's Butt Paste, Triple Paste, Desitin, Aquaphor. (Desitin Daily Defense at ~1,200 ppb is detectable; if that bothers you, switch to plain Aquaphor or pure petroleum jelly.) Lotion: CeraVe, Cetaphil, Vanicream, Eucerin, Aveeno baby. Sunscreen: Banana Boat, Neutrogena, ThinkBaby, Blue Lizard, EltaMD. Lipstick: any FDA-regulated US drugstore brand, even the cheap ones, they're below the 10 ppm cosmetic limit. The dollar tube of CVS lipstick is cleaner than the $40 hand-made Etsy pot.
03
If a family member uses cultural products, bring it up gently with the data, not the judgment.
Kohl, surma, sindoor, and the folk remedies above are deeply tied to family and cultural tradition in many households. The CDC's MMWR series on this is decades long not because anyone's careless, but because the tradition predates the modern understanding of lead toxicity. The right move is to share the data, FDA Import Alert 53-13, the Pure Earth 2024 study (in Consumer Reports), the CDC MMWR write-ups, and offer a clean substitute. For kohl specifically, modern carbon-black or charcoal-based eye products from regulated US retailers achieve the same look without lead. There are FDA-compliant kajal-style products on the US market. This is a swap, not a denial.
Yes, kids eat about 10× less lead than adults, but cultural remedies and kohl are the exception.
One of the recurring themes in this series: kids consume less food and water by mass than adults, so even when the ppb is the same, their dose is a fraction. That's why food panic is usually overblown. That's why the salt math is fine.
Personal care breaks the pattern in two specific places. One: kohl, surma, and topical folk remedies are applied directly to mucosa or broken skin, where absorption is dramatically higher than oral. A 6,400 µg lead "dose" placed on a baby's conjunctiva is not equivalent to 6,400 µg in food, it's worse, because the bioavailability is closer to 100% rather than the ~50% for oral lead in fasted children. Two: these products are concentrated by design. There's no "small serving size" buffer the way there is with salt or canned goods. A pinch of azarcon administered to a toddler with a stomachache is the entire dose.
This is the category in the Easy Wins series where I'm most insistent. Don't discount it. The four emergency categories above belong in the trash, tonight, full stop.
Next easy win
More in this series.
The Easy Wins series is about the 80/20 of lead safety, what to do in 15 minutes that moves the needle more than 15 hours of reading guides. Personal care is the highest-leverage 15 minutes you can spend tonight: open four drawers, throw out four product categories, sleep better.
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