Shall we be worried about benzene in dry shampoo?

Dry shampoo is a very popular segment of the hair care. The concept is not new at all and before clean tapped water was available to the public people (upperclass and nobility) used powders such as clays and starch to clean their scalp and hair or deodorize their wigs. As an alternative a piece of wool attached to a comb was used to comb hair to clean the hair and scalp or rather to get rid of the lice.

During the recent years modern dry shampoo, conveniently filled in aerosol cans has taken the market by storm.

The main aim of the dry shampoo is to keep hair beautiful in between two hair washes or jazz up the hair after a work out when you don't have time to wash, dry and style the hair. This concept has been somehow abused and there are a few individuals that only and only use the dry shampoo and have stopped hair washing totally or do it very rarely. This has again caused other problems that vary between itchy scalp and sensitization to hair loss. There are a few viral videos on youtube and tiktok addressing these issues. Whereas the problem is not in the product but in the wrong way of using it.

Anyway only last year several brands of dry shampoo were?reported?with alarmingly high dosage of benzene, a known carcinogen.

Quite obviously nobody will add the benzene deliberately to a product. It is the inherent impurity available in the propellants in the dry shampoo which is petroleum derived.

Shall we be worried about benzene in dry shampoo?

Hell yes!

Although the benzene is not deliberately added to the dry shampoo it is there. So are the nitrosamines or the dioxane in other conventional cosmetic raw material. They are there and they are known carcinogens. This is why we came such a long way to create "natural" personal care. In order to avoid certain chemicals and ingredients.

I usually don't make a fuss around chemicals and detest fearmongering. Hell, I am a chemist and I have even worked with benzene in the lab during my junior chemistry student time. I definitely avoid public pleasing buzzwords such as "non-toxic" or "clean" or "chemicals-free" but there are even limits to my chemical tolerance and hence I was quite shocked when a few celebrity cosmetic chemists and safety assessors recently announced in an interview that "we don't need to be concerned about the presence of benzene in dry shampoo". It is even worse than that.

“When you fill your car with gas, you’ll be exposed to more benzene than you would be via cosmetic products,”

Is the argument my respected cosmetic chemist colleague has expressed.

Oh hell! What does that mean?

When I tank my car (by the way I walk or use the bike as much as possible and when not, I drive an e-car and tank solar electricity) I am in a stinky filling station and I try to minimize my staying there and even minimize my breathing. How shall we minimize our breathing when we apply a product that is supposed to improve our well being when it is contaminated with benzene. How ridiculous is this argument?

Now Lahore, Mumbai, Delhi, Cairo and Hotan belong to the most polluted cities in the world. I don't assume people infuse their butter with sulfur dioxide, lead or nitrogen oxides in those cities because they are anyway exposed to those chemicals with each breath.

The era of petrochemicals is passe and the sooner we accept this the better we can move forward. The way the are extracted, refined, used and their impact on the environment are not acceptable anymore. If it were not for a bunch of blissfully blind and ignorant politicians, we should have more ecars and charging stations on the roads than those combustion engines that infuse the air we breath with the benzene so that we shall not be concerned about a little bit of benzene in a dry shampoo aerosol can.

So what?

It doesn't mean that benzene (or other contaminants) fall out of the blue sky in our ingredients and products. They have been there all the time but perhaps nobody has searched for them as much as we do these days

seek, and ye shall find;?

in addition to that we are seeking these days what we were not seeking 20 years ago, the improved precision of the analytical methods enable us to measure impurities at a much lower concentration threshold as it was even imaginable a decade ago.

As long as the aerosols are not quite forbidden, we need to search for a possibility to remove those unwanted contaminants from the propellants (I have no clue about this and leave the discussion to experts but I do not accept impossible as an option).

Some environmental friendly brands such as Alverde (a brand of the DM in Germany) have their dry shampoos in non-aerosol containers, in powder dispensers (with or without an applicator brush). This is honestly much more messy and inconvenient compared to the aerosol version but the love of convenience has brought up to the environmental disaster that we are confronted with right now.

Let the consumer decide between the safety, environmental impact of the product and the convenience but for heaven's sake do not try to play down the reality as a scientist.