New research suggests that everyday personal care products like perfumes and lotions might be inadvertently interfering with a chemical defense system around your body, potentially leading to unforeseen health consequences.
That innocent spray of perfume or swipe of lotion you apply each day could be doing more than just making you smell good – it might be disrupting a powerful, invisible “chemical force shield” that surrounds your body, according to a new study.
This intriguing shield, dubbed the human oxidation field, is believed to rapidly react with molecules in our immediate environment, neutralizing potentially harmful volatile compounds.
However, a recent study, published in Science Advances, indicates that when perfumes or lotions are applied to the skin, they can significantly alter the air chemistry directly surrounding the body.
This alteration could lead to the formation of toxic chemical byproducts that are then inhaled or absorbed into the skin.
“Given that the human oxidation field influences the chemical composition of air in the breathing zone and close to the skin, it affects our intake of chemicals, which, in turn, affects human health,” state Nora Zannoni, an atmospheric scientist at the Max Planck Institute, and her colleagues.
The human oxidation field itself is a relatively recent discovery, only identified in 2022 by a team that included several of the current study’s authors.
They found that skin oils react with ozone pollutants in the air to generate a field of hydroxyl (OH) radicals around the human body. These OH radicals are often referred to as an atmospheric ‘detergent’ due due to their ability to react with and neutralize a wide array of airborne pollutants.
While beneficial in neutralizing pollutants, the researchers acknowledge a potential downside: some of these chemical reactions might produce hazardous byproducts right next to our skin and airways.
Understanding how this oxidation field interacts with the myriad of chemicals in our indoor and outdoor environments is a burgeoning area of health research.
In the current study, four young adults were observed in a controlled indoor environment. Scientists measured the chemicals around their bodies and in the air both with and without the application of personal care products.
A key finding emerged when participants applied lotion.
Chemicals like phenoxyethanol and ethanol were observed drifting upwards from the skin on ‘thermal plumes’ – dispersing into the ambient air via body heat.
These lotion chemical concentrations continued to climb steadily around each participant for a full 10 minutes post-application, with levels near the nose, for instance, recorded at 2.8 times higher than the ambient air.
The researchers then introduced ozone from an inlet in the floor.
Ozone, formed when sunlight interacts with volatile organic compounds, can seep into buildings and react with skin oil to create the human oxidation field.
The team discovered that body lotion reacted with this field from head to toe, significantly hindering ozone’s ability to generate a crucial OH precursor and reducing its concentration around participants by 34%.
A similar effect was observed when participants applied fragrance to their hands. Both ethanol and monoterpenes soared to levels 10 times higher above the participants’ heads than in the surrounding ambient air.
While this study focused solely on the chemical changes occurring around the human body and did not investigate direct health effects, the volatile reactions observed are a cause for concern among the researchers.
The implications of these findings are profound, suggesting a need for further research into how our daily routines and product choices might be subtly, yet significantly, impacting our personal chemical environments and, by extension, our health.
