Where you end up in life is mostly out of your hands. Your lead exposure isn't.
This is the free lead safety journey. Everything I've learned, tested, and built over the last few years, laid out in the order that makes it make sense. No account, no email, no kit required. Start wherever your life actually is.
If you got here from the crystal video: the two dots that drift apart are the whole point. Small differences early turn into big differences later. Lead is one of the few early differences you can actually do something about, and most of it takes an evening.
Three things to check tonight
Each one takes a minute, costs nothing, and tells you where to look first.
1 · Where you live
Your ZIP code
Type your ZIP. You get the housing age and water system picture for your area, and what that means for paint, pipes, and soil.
Check my ZIP2 · What you eat off of
Your dishes
2,165 dishes and pieces of cookware scanned with an XRF, searchable by brand and pattern. See if yours is in there before you eat off it again.
Check my dish3 · What your kid eats
Your kid's food
1,343 foods, four metals. Pick what your kid actually eats and get a daily dose in micrograms, next to the FDA limit.
Run the numbersPick the path that fits you
Six walkthroughs, one for each kind of person who ends up here. Each one goes start to finish: what to know, what to check, what to do next.
A baby on the way, or just here
Prenatal vitamins, formula, bottles, baby food, and the house they'll crawl through.
Open the path →Lead in your house
Paint, dust, windows, water, soil. The walk-through every renter and owner of a pre-1978 home should do once.
Open the path →Dishes, cookware, decor
Imported, vintage, hand-painted, hand-me-down. Which categories fail, and the 30-second drop test for any piece.
Open the path →Adults 55+ and grandkids
Your lifetime lead burden, the heart and the memory, and the kid in your house.
Open the path →Just bought a kit
The first ten surfaces in priority order, what counts as a positive, and what to do when something glows.
Open the path →Renovating, or just moved in
Sanding and scraping in an old house makes dust. Test before the weekend project, not after.
Open the path →The journey. 18 lessons, all free.
Lead Safe University. Everything I know about lead, in the order that makes it make sense. Work through it at your own pace. You can't fail it, and nothing is behind a form.
L
Learn
Why this matters, what "no safe level" really means, how we got here, what lead does to a body, where it hides.
8 lessons
E
Examine
The home tour, your dishes, hobbies and the range, soil, water and food, then seeing it with your own eyes.
5 lessons
A
Abate
Clean it up right. Keep it or retire it, and how not to spread it around. Renovating? Test first.
2 lessons
D
Diet and body
Feed the body to block lead, the detox truth, and how to put this down once you've done the work.
3 lessonsFinish all 18 and the 133-page Lead Framework book is yours to keep. It's also free without finishing, I just think the lessons land better first.
Every free tool on the site
Real data, mostly scanned or measured by me. None of it needs an email.
ZIP screenerHousing age and water picture for your ZIP.Open →
The national lead risk mapDown to your block. Where the old housing is.Open →
Check your dish2,165 dishes and cookware, XRF scanned, by brand and pattern.Open →
Universal food calculator1,343 foods, four metals, your kid's daily dose vs the FDA limit.Open →
Baby food lookupEvery California AB 899 disclosure, 18,124 lot tests, by brand, metal, and lot.Open →
Scan a pouchPoint your phone at the lot code on any pouch. Instant readout.Open →
Baby bottle sheetEvery bottle on the market, scored on lead and what shows up next to it.Open →
Baby-proof calculatorEight questions about your house. A risk band you can take to a pediatrician.Open →
Easy Wins19 short lessons. Fifteen minutes a day, cut household exposure.Open →
First test guideThe ten surfaces to test first, in order, and what a positive looks like.Open →
The Lead Framework book133 pages. Learn, examine, abate, defend. The whole house in one manual.Open →
The libraryEverything I've written, the research, the case studies, the papers.Open →
The full toolkit, 14 tools on one page: detectlead.com/start.
Why I keep saying the small stuff matters
The two dots in the video start a hair apart and end up nowhere near each other. Childhood lead works the same way. These numbers are from the studies, not from me.
3.9 pointsIQ lost going from 2.4 to 10 µg/dL of blood lead, and the curve is steepest at the low end.Lanphear 2005, seven pooled cohorts
2.3×The odds of ADHD in the top third of blood lead versus the bottom third, ages 8 to 15.Froehlich 2009, Pediatrics
4.25 pointsLower adult IQ at 38 for kids who were over 10 µg/dL at age 11, plus a slide down the social ladder.Reuben 2017, JAMA
About 2%Of lifetime earnings, per IQ point. It compounds the same way the hockey birthdays do.Grosse 2002, CDC
And it isn't only one kid. Leaded gasoline alone cost about 824 million IQ points across 170 million Americans alive today (McFarland 2022, PNAS). None of that is a reason to panic. It's a reason to check.
When you need to see it for yourself
The free tools tell you where to look. When you need an answer about one specific thing, the plate in your hand, the windowsill, the toy from the thrift store, the kit shows you. One drop or one spray on a dry surface, shine the 365 nm light, and lead glows green in seconds. No lab, no mailing anything in.
$75 full kit: drip bottle, spray bottle, UV flashlight, reference card
Half kits from $50. Up to about 3,600 drip tests or about 500 sprays per bottle.
The active ingredient, methylammonium bromide (CAS 6876-37-5), is manufactured and imported by Fluoro-Spec Inc. under a U.S. EPA-authorized Low Volume Exemption (LVE) granted under Section 5 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (40 CFR 723.50). That authorization is what makes it legal to make and sell. It is a different thing from an "EPA-recognized" lead test kit under the renovation rule. Here's what that phrase means. The Safety Data Sheet is free at detectlead.com/sds.
Stuck anywhere? Call me.
or eric@fluorospect.com. I'll walk you through whatever you're looking at. That's the whole point of this.