Their fragrance may be pleasant, but their health impact is unclear, and possibly dangerous.
Phthalates are a class of chemicals primarily used to treat plastics to make them flexible, but they are also ubiquitous in artificial fragrances: air sprays, plug ins, detergents and cleansers, and scented candles.
Mitchel Zoler/Elsevier Global Medical News
“Almost no home product does not have a fragrance, and we don’t need these things,” Jerome Paulson said last week at a meeting on children’s health and the environment.
Phthalates are endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and while the evidence remains preliminary so far they may potentially cause important disruptions to human reproductive development and function, trigger allergies, and are possibly carcinogenic.
“To the extent that we worry about phthalates [for these possible health effects], we don’t need these things,” said Dr. Paulson, a specialist on the health effects of the environment at Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. His argument is: Why should modern society and manufacturers insist on prettifying the odors of so many commercial products with compounds that may pose health risks?
“If you had a law that banned all fragrances, I think the long-term benefit would be large,” he said. He went on to advise those at the meeting to “take the precautionary approach and get them out of your life even though we can’t [currently] prove that they are bad” for human health.
---Mitchel Zoler (on Twitter @mitchelzoler)