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Are You Putting ‘Forever Chemicals’ on Your Face?
When you put on lipstick or foundation, you expect a little glamour — not a dose of harmful chemicals that could stay in your body for years and on the planet forever. Yet until recently, that’s exactly what many beauty products delivered. The good news? Initiated by a 2021 scientific study and some strategic science communication, change is sweeping through the global cosmetics industry.
This is the story of how evidence, advocacy, and a splash of media coverage helped turn mascara and lip gloss into a frontline for public health and transformed a multi-billion-dollar industry. In 2021, the Green Science Policy Institute, working with researchers from Notre Dame, Indiana, and Toronto, tested hundreds of cosmetics. What our joint peer-reviewed study found was sobering: more than half contained fluorine — a red flag for the likely presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), also known as “forever chemicals.” Waterproof mascara, liquid lipstick, and foundation had the highest levels.
When we dug deeper, some products contained multiple different harmful PFAS compounds. And here’s the kicker: most did not list PFAS on their label.
Why does this matter? Of the PFAS tested for toxicity, nearly all have been linked to cancer, infertility, thyroid disease, reduced vaccine effectiveness, and more. In beauty products, PFAS can be ingested in lipstick, absorbed through the skin, or seep in through tear ducts.
What Researchers Suspect May Be Fueling Cancer Among Millennials
As cancer rates surge among young people, this series explores navigating the illness in the prime of life, where dating, careers and identity collide with diagnosis, treatment and survival. The trend began with younger members of Generation X but is now most visible among millennials, who are being diagnosed in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s — decades earlier than past generations. Medications taken during pregnancy, the spread of ultra-processed foods, disruptions to circadian rhythms — caused by late-night work, global travel and omnipresent screens — and the proliferation of synthetic chemicals are all under scrutiny.
Older Americans are still more likely to be diagnosed than younger ones. But cancer rates among those aged 15 to 49 have increased by 10% since 2000 even as they have fallen among older people, according to a Washington Post examination of federal data. Young women are more affected than men. From ages 15 through 49, women have a cancer rate that is 83% higher than men in the same age range.
The rise in early-onset cancers has drawn a growing number of scientists into a shared investigation: not into the inherited traits that remain largely unchanged as a cause of cancer across generations, but into the ways modern life might be rewriting the body’s cellular fate. The new research direction examines the “exposome” — the full range of environmental exposures a person experiences throughout his or her life, even before birth — and how those exposures interact with biology.
In Washington, a Battle Builds Over a Right to Sue Pesticide Makers
It’s been seven years since Germany’s Bayer bought U.S. agrochemical giant Monsanto, inheriting not only the company’s vast portfolio of seeds and pesticide products, but also more than 100,000 lawsuits alleging Monsanto’s popular Roundup herbicide causes cancer. Bayer, which has so far paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts to cancer victims, has been working — so far in vain — to put an end to the litigation and to block any future such cases.
Now, the company appears closer than ever to success, as many Republican congressional leaders push for measures that would effectively block lawsuits against pesticide makers around the country.
A group founded by Bayer called the Modern Ag Alliance is the face of the legislative push, advocating for liability shields they say are necessary to allow companies to continue to sell pesticides that farmers use to kill weeds and bugs in their fields.
The group says it represents more than 100 agricultural organizations, including farmers who grow wheat, corn, soybeans and other key food crops.
Defense Department Delays Cleanup of ‘Forever Chemicals’ Nationwide
The Department of Defense has quietly delayed its cleanup of harmful “forever chemicals” at nearly 140 military installations across the country, according to a list of sites analyzed by The New York Times. The Pentagon has been one of the most intensive users of these chemicals, which are also known as PFAS and are a key ingredient in firefighting foam. For decades, crews at U.S. military bases would train to battle flames by lighting jet-fuel fires, then putting them out with large amounts of foam, which would leach into the soil and groundwater.
In 2017, military communities nationwide began to report alarming levels of the chemicals in their drinking water. A growing body of research has linked PFAS exposure to serious health concerns including certain types of cancer as well as child developmental and fertility issues. The Pentagon’s new timeline would delay cleanup around military sites by nearly a decade in some cases, according to the latest list, which is dated in March and was posted publicly in recent weeks without an announcement.
The delays vary by site. They add up to a significant revision from the Pentagon’s earlier cleanup timetable, which had been released three months earlier, in December 2024, in the final days of the Biden administration. The Department of Defense, which the Trump administration now refers to as the Department of War, did not respond to requests for comment.
To Get ‘Toxic Stew’ out of State’s Lakes, Legislators Eye New Ways to Fund Cyanobacteria Mitigation
New Hampshire Bulletin reported:
Lake-minded New Hampshire legislators are gearing up to tackle water quality once again this session, after some measures aimed at preventing and treating cyanobacteria blooms were voted down or softened last session. “We’ve got a really enormous problem headed at us, especially with climate change and warming waters,” said sponsor Sen. David Watters. “… I’m worried it will create this toxic stew in our lakes and along the shore.”
Watters said he had two main objectives in mind for the bill: Formalizing a strategy to address cyanobacteria blooms and other emerging water quality threats, then settling on a way to fund those efforts. Blooms are population explosions of single-celled, toxin-producing organisms called cyanobacteria. Sometimes, they appear as surface scum or swirling green clouds, but they may also sink to the bottom of a lake or appear less dense, making them invisible to the casual observer.
Cyanobacteria thrive in nutrient-flooded water, often the result of septic and fertilizer runoff, and in warm temperatures. Warming associated with climate change is causing them to appear more often, and though they typically occur in summer, in some New Hampshire lakes, cyanobacteria blooms are occurring year-round.
New Mexico Governor Puts Finger on Scale in Oilfield Wastewater Vote
The administration of New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham appears to have pressured members of the state Water Quality Control Commission to consider a petition reversing a rule the commission passed unanimously in May that banned fossil fuel wastewater from being used outside oilfield work and testing.
The commission’s August meeting marked the first time in years that all four department secretaries on the panel had shown up at the same time, raising eyebrows. Those secretaries then led the push to support a new petition that would overturn a rule whose development entailed more than a year of hearings and scientific debate.
In a statement to SourceNM, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said she “encouraged relevant cabinet secretaries to bring their expertise” to the proceedings. In an interview with Capital & Main and New Mexico PBS, James Kenney, the Environment Department secretary and a Water Quality Control Commissioner, said, “The governor did not explicitly ask us to all show up.” And recent reporting by the Santa Fe New Mexican reveals emails between the Governor’s Office, Kenney and other commissioners where they discussed pushing rules allowing wider use of oilfield wastewater “over the finish line.”
