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Perhaps the single worst word you’ll read all week – phthalates are pronounced “THAL-ATES”. Maybe Webster can remove the first two letters for us next year – they’re completely useless.
Phthalates are a collection of chemical compounds. It’s more of a category, the way that “mushrooms” is a category. There are hundreds of different phthalates, all with various properties and uses.
Most phthalates are solvents in plastics manufacturing to make rigid plastic more flexible. All sorts of products use them across hundreds of industries. Unless listed on the package, you might not even know it’s present since it’s sometimes an ingredient for another ingredient.
It’s not really fair to classify all phthalates as equals. They come in such variety and serve such a diverse set of functions in manufacturing that substituting one for another isn’t really fair. Similar to mushrooms – not all mushrooms are suitable for cooking. According to the IFRA, only one type of phthalate is commonly used in cosmetics (fragrances): diethyl phthalate (DEP).
When used, DEP operates as a solvent in fragrance oils. Solvents enable materials that don’t normally blend together at room temperature to combine. Fragrance development requires this all the time because the ingredients don’t normally like each other without DEP. In that way, DEP is like your favorite aunt.
Without using DEP, smart chemical engineers have to resort to lesser alternatives, like vegetable oil, castor oil, or other weirdly-named chemicals (hello, isopropyl myristate and dioctyl adipate!). They’re normally not as good as DEP, which is why DEP is so popular.
…until fairly recently.
Some high-profile scientific studies found many of the other phthalates caused adverse health risks. Discovering how toxic these chemicals were, regulatory bodies across the world swiftly banned their use in a variety of manufacturing markets, namely children’s toys. Companies across the world are more interested in “phthalate-free” products where possible to avoid known health risks exposed by recent studies.
Marketing campaigns and industry chatter quickly characterized “phthalates” as dangerous ingredients, eventually raising the ultimate question about their use in fragrance oils next: Are candles that use fragrance oils containing phthalates toxic?
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