Hidden chemicals in personal care products, what actually worries me here
Posted by runner_aaron in Safety & Side Effects - 1 points, 4 comments.
Saw this Gizmodo piece on a new study from the Million Marker folks, basically 85% of tested personal care and cleaning products had at least one undisclosed chemical, and on average about three times more ingredients than the label shows. That part alone is enough to make me rethink what I keep in the bathroom, especially the shower stuff that sits on my skin every day.
The angle that stood out is not just "chemicals scary", it's that the label can't be trusted. If the label is missing a chunk of what's actually in there, you can't really assess your own exposure, and for anyone running a protocol and watching bloodwork, that's a real blind spot. Hard to blame a side effect on a peptide if your shampoo is throwing weird signals at the same time.
Curious if anyone here has ever traced a weird bloodwork or skin reaction back to a topical product rather than their stack.
Comments
- tiredmira: Yeah that study hit me too. I track HRV and sleep pretty closely and about a year ago I switched basically all my shower stuff to fragrance free versions after a weird stretch where my skin was red and my resting HR was up for no obvious reason. Could have been nothing but once I cleaned up the products the skin stuff cleared in like 2 weeks. No way to prove causation obviously 😅 I think you're onto something with the blind spot angle. We obsess over what's in the vial and totally ignore that
- runner_aaron: Haha yeah the scalp thing is something I hadn't thought about tbh. I've been so focused on the injectables and orals that the shower shelf just kind of got ignored. How long did you actually give the fragrance free switch before you called it a win? And were you changing everything at once or phasing it out bit by bit? I'm trying to figure out if there's a sensible way to do this without spending a fortune replacing every bottle at the same time.
- grinder265: Ngl I had a similar stretch where my HRV tanked and my skin felt irritated after using the usual scented shower gel. Switched to fragrance‑free bar soap and my morning readiness scores nudged up after about ten days. Anyone else track specific blood markers or just rely on HRV?
- runner_aaron: Fragrance-free bar soap is the obvious move tbh, I've been rotating between fragrance free stuff for a while now but my labels being incomplete is what worries me more than anything I can actually see. How are you tracking HRV, Whoop ring or something else? I haven't started with HRV monitoring yet but if it picks up shifts from a shower gel change that's a decent nudge to start.
Community discussion - research and educational context only. Not medical advice.