Phthalates in personal care products: what’s actually known

“Phthalate-free” has joined “paraben-free” on the front of a lot of bottles, and most people have a vague sense that phthalates are bad news. The details are more interesting. Phthalates are mostly a plastics story, not a skin care story, and the one member of the family that does turn up in personal care is a quiet passenger inside the word “fragrance”. Here’s how it fits together.

What phthalates are, and what they do in plastic

Phthalates are a large family of oily, colourless liquids. Their main job, in Health Canada’s words, is “used in plastics to soften and increase flexibility”. The vinyl in a shower curtain, a garden hose or an old-style toy is stiff on its own; phthalates are what make it bendy.

That’s why phthalates are everywhere: flooring, cables, food packaging, car interiors, printing inks, medical tubing. It’s also why they’re in you. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Public Health notes that almost every Canadian surveyed between 2018 and 2019, aged 6 to 79, had detectable phthalate breakdown products in their urine. The routes are mostly food (phthalates migrate from packaging), household dust and indoor air.

Personal care is one route among many, and for most phthalates, not the main one.

What phthalates do in cosmetics

Only a few phthalates have ever been cosmetic ingredients, and their jobs were different from the plastics job:

• Diethyl phthalate (DEP): a solvent and fixative in fragrance. It dissolves scent oils and slows their evaporation so a perfume lasts.
• Dibutyl phthalate (DBP): a plasticizer in nail polish, to keep the film from cracking.
• Dimethyl phthalate (DMP): a film-former in hair sprays.

The FDA surveyed cosmetics in 2010 and found that use of phthalates had “decreased considerably from 2004 to 2010”, that DBP and DMP had become rare, and that DEP was the only phthalate still commonly used. Most products tested had no detectable phthalates at all; the exceptions were some fragrances, where DEP was found at much higher levels.

So when a shampoo, lotion or body wash contains a phthalate today, it’s almost certainly DEP, and it’s almost certainly there because the product is scented.

Why you won’t find it on the label

Here’s the frustrating part. Health Canada’s labelling rules let the components of a fragrance be listed individually or grouped under the single word “parfum” (the US uses “fragrance”), and almost every company chooses the single word. The FDA’s page says it plainly: consumers “will not be able to determine from the ingredient declaration if phthalates are present in a fragrance”.

That means “no phthalates on the label” tells you nothing. The only reliable clue is a product that contains no fragrance at all. If you want to avoid DEP, fragrance-free products are the practical route.

What Health Canada concluded

The Government of Canada assessed 14 phthalates as a group, and widened the scope to include DEHP, DBP, DEP and others, to account for the possibility that small exposures to several phthalates add up. The final assessment, published in December 2020, concluded that the 14 in the original group are not harmful to human health or the environment at current levels of exposure.

The exception is DEHP, the workhorse plastic softener. Canada declared it harmful to human health back in 1994, and the 2020 assessment added that it “is entering or may enter the environment at levels that are harmful to the environment”. DEHP is prohibited in Canadian cosmetics on the Cosmetic Ingredient Hotlist (Health Canada’s list of banned and restricted cosmetic ingredients), it’s restricted in soft vinyl toys and child-care articles, and the government proposed a broader ban on making, importing or selling it.

DEP and DBP had been assessed earlier and found not harmful at current exposure. Neither is prohibited in Canadian cosmetics. The 2024 Frontiers review criticizes exactly that: it points out that DBP and benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP) remain permitted in Canadian cosmetics even though the EU bans them, and calls for Canada to tighten up. That’s a live policy debate, and reasonable scientists are on both sides of it.

What the EU and the FDA concluded

The European Union bans DEHP, DBP and BBP in cosmetics because they’re classified as toxic to reproduction. DEP is a different case. The EU’s scientific committee first gave DEP a positive safety opinion in 2002 and confirmed it in 2003. When an environmental group reported finding DEP in perfumes in 2005, the committee looked again in 2007 and found that newer studies “did not provide sufficient new information to change the conclusions”. Its worst-case calculation assumed DEP at up to 50% of a fragrance and still found a comfortable margin of safety.

The FDA reached a similar place. It concluded there “wasn’t a sound, scientific basis to support taking regulatory action against cosmetics containing phthalates” and says it doesn’t have evidence that they pose a safety risk as used.

What the evidence shows for skin

Skin isn’t really the battleground here. None of the regulators’ assessments of phthalates turn on rashes or irritation; the safety reviews of DEP in cosmetics looked at how much passes through skin and what it does inside the body, and found the margins comfortable. If you react to a perfumed lotion, the scent ingredients themselves are far more likely culprits than the DEP holding them together.

The real scientific question is about hormones. Some phthalates act as anti-androgens, meaning they can interfere with the male hormone testosterone during development. The Frontiers review summarizes associations reported in human studies, including reduced semen quality and altered development in boys. The phthalates classified as toxic to reproduction, and banned in EU cosmetics on that basis, are DEHP, DBP and BBP, not DEP. Association isn’t proof of cause, and the amount that gets through your skin from a lotion is small, but this is why regulators keep re-examining the family and why the larger members are banned.

Should you avoid phthalates?

If you’re pregnant, trying to conceive, or shopping for a baby, minimizing phthalate exposure is a reasonable precaution, and the easiest personal-care step is going fragrance-free. Health Canada’s own tips for cutting exposure are broader than cosmetics: look for “phthalate-free” or “PVC-free” labels, check soft plastics for recycling code 3, and keep soft vinyl items away from young children who chew on things.

If you’re not in one of those groups and you like your scented products, the regulators in Canada, the EU and the US all currently consider DEP in cosmetics low risk, and skin reactions to it are rare. Choosing to keep it is also reasonable.

Either way, the answer isn’t on the label. Phthalates are a plastics problem that spills a little into fragrance, DEHP is the one Canada has banned from cosmetics, and “fragrance-free” is the one word that reliably tells you a product has no DEP in it.