The Case Against Fragrance by Kate Grenville

The Case Against Fragrance by Kate Grenville

Author:Kate Grenville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2016-12-08T05:00:00+00:00


The tests that RIFM does are properly run scientific studies. Their methods are well accepted, their results reliable, and they’re published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Still, like many scientific studies, they have some significant limitations—and consumer-protection regula­tions built on scientific studies can only be protective if the science of those studies is watertight.

A major weakness is that not all of the nearly three thousand fragrance chemicals have been tested. Testing is time-consuming and expensive. Even a basic toxicological test is a large-scale affair involving many lab animals over several weeks or months. Testing to see if a chemical is a carcinogen is even more expensive. A two-year cancer study using lab animals costs around US$2 million per test.5

The most straightforward kind of test is for skin aller­gies—and this is one reason why IFRA’s regulations are mostly about those complaints. But skin contact is only one way of being exposed to fragrance chemicals, and skin allergies are only one kind of health problem.

Testing is expensive, but it’s not compulsory. In fact, the question really isn’t: why aren’t all chemicals tested? It’s more like: why are any chemicals tested? Only IFRA knows how many chemicals its lab has tested. And, although many of its studies have been published and are freely available, there may be others where the results haven’t been made public. No lab is obliged to make its results public, even if it would be in the public interest to do so.

These realities are reflected in the limits of the data available from RIFM studies. Many fragrance chemicals have been tested for skin sensitisation. Fewer have been tested for toxicity. Fewer again have been tested for carci­nogenicity. And for many chemicals, as we’ve seen, there’s no data at all.

If there’ve been no tests (or none that have been published), there’ll be no negative reports, no matter how harmful the chemical may be. Scientists, fond of a pungent aphorism, like to remind us that ‘absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence.’

Even the longest studies on fragrance chemicals may not go on long enough. Cancer can take decades to develop. Hormone problems can take even longer—they can begin before birth, via the mother’s bloodstream. The long-term animal studies don’t necessarily reflect the real lifetime exposure that humans have between the womb and the nursing home.

A significant limitation of IFRA’s tests—or at least the regulations based on them—is that the calculations about safe exposure for humans are mostly based on animal studies (the exceptions are a few skin-allergy studies on human subjects). Rats and mice are mammals like us. They get tumours as we do. Their brains, like ours, are affected by chemicals. But many of their body mechanisms are quite different from ours. Animals have evolved to be more sensitive to some chemicals than we are, but less sensitive to others. Some of the ways they detoxify chemicals are different from ours, too.

This means that something that causes problems in an animal may not cause them in humans. We can eat chocolate with no ill effects other than a pang of guilt, but chocolate can kill a cat or dog.



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