Formaldehyde Inside My Shampoo Forever

Warning: this post contains excessive use of memes, as well as outright mockery of contemporary "artist" Damien Hirst.

If you’ve sat in a high school biology class, you might remember that formaldehyde is the preservative in all those jars full of spiders and mouse foetuses. It’s also used in disinfectants and resins, as a preservative in pharmaceuticals, and in producing rather expensive works of contemporary art.

This is the structural formula of formaldehyde. 

Admire it now, before Damien Hirst covers it in rhinestones and decides it's been copyrighted.

Also, it's in some cosmetics! Formaldehyde, all over you! Quick, throw out all your shampoo and nail polish and go live in a cave before the chemicals come and murder your whole family.

Earlier this year, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was removing formaldehyde from its baby shampoo products - or, more specifically, it was removing a preservative which released trace amounts of formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde is an entirely natural substance - it’s found in most fruits, vegetables and dairy products. It’s also produced by your own liver as part of your everyday metabolic processes - your body has about 2.5 micrograms of formaldehyde per millilitre of blood. The body breaks ingested formaldehyde down into formic acid (the venom that’s found in ant and bee stings, incidentally). 

According to Johnson & Johnson's own toxicologist, if you sat down and drank fourteen bottles of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, you would have ingested as much formaldehyde as you can find in one apple. However, this level of nuance seems to have been lost on the media, who responded with headlines like “Johnson & Johnson owns up to deadly formaldehyde-containing products."

The mistake that's being made here (other than my mistake of visiting a website called Natural News, which is also on a mission to stamp out water fluoridation) is a misunderstanding of the scale of the quantities involved. An excess of literally anything - formaldehyde, cyanide, sunlight, food, water, pictures of LOLcats - might do you harm. But we're exposed to trace amounts of countless chemicals every day. It's the dose that makes the poison.

So, if your body can safely handle the amount of formaldehyde in an apple, it can likely manage the tiny amount absorbed by rubbing shampoo into your hair. But instead of trying to give people a primary-school-level maths lesson, manufacturers bow to hysteria and replace innocuous ingredients with something with less name recognition - even if the replacement ingredient isn't as effective, or as rigorously tested.

There's a similar occurence in the food industry: "all-natural" stevia is used to replace aspartame as a sweetener, even though aspartame has a longer history of safe use. Why do people get hysterical about aspartame? Because it's metabolised into very small amounts of methanol - much less methanol than you would expect to find in, say, fruit juice - and then into very small amounts of Evil Formaldehyde. (As an aside, stevia - sold by the Coca-Cola company as Truvia - is purified by extraction with methanol.)

In another effort to combat The Formaldehyde Menace, almost every nail polish is suddenly wearing a label proclaiming itself "3 free!" That's free of the ingredients formaldehyde, toluene and dibutyl phthalate.

I heard you like nails, so I got you some nail-coloured nail polish

so you can colour your nails the same colour as your nails.

This sounds all well and good, except:

• Formaldehyde isn't even used in nail polishes - it's found only in nail hardening products. You might as well advertise that your nail polish is free of anthrax.
• The products used to replace the "big three" aren't necessarily any safer, only less well-known. For example, butyl acetate, found in all these 3-free polishes, is a potential carcinogen. That's not to say that coating bits of proteins on your fingertips with a minuscule amount of butyl acetate will do you harm, but by that logic, neither should toluene. 
• Unless you're actually injecting yourself with nail polish, the likelihood of you consuming a toxic amount of any of these chemicals is vanishingly small. Whilst it is possible to be allergic or sensitive to them, it is also possible to be allergic to things like peanuts. This does not mean that nobody should eat peanuts ever.

Trace amounts of formaldehyde in cosmetics aren't poison, in much the same way that dead sharks aren't art - the proponents of formaldehyde-free products are just incredibly vocal. The marketing of formaldehyde-free products is, essentially, an alarmist and cynical scam designed to separate scientifically-illiterate people from their money by selling them "alternative" products which aren't necessarily any better or safer.