Students who view more social media use more products that often harbor hormone-disrupting ingredients

Personal care products are among the largest everyday sources of exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and high school students who follow social media influencers or watch beauty tutorials seem to use considerably more of them, according to Rutgers researchers.

In a Rutgers-led study published in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, researchers surveyed 143 students at Princeton High School in New Jersey about product use. They found that more time on social media and greater engagement with beauty-related content predicted greater product use.

After researchers accounted for gender, grade, race, ethnicity and parents’ education, they found that students who followed influencers with product lines reported using 30% more products in the previous 24 hours. Those who watched hair or beauty tutorials used 40% more.

It was a novel finding that researchers on the study team credited to a pair of then-high school students, Gabrielle Kaputa and Vita Moss-Wang, who helped design and conduct the survey and suggested it include questions about social media use.

“Social media turned out to be the most interesting part of our results,” said Emily Barrett, the George G. Rhoads Endowed Legacy Professor and vice chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the Rutgers School of Public Health and the lead author of the study.

“We often hear that social media may hurt kids’ mental health and socioemotional development,” she added. “This study suggests another cause for concern: social media’s potential to increase the use of personal care products that often include hormone-disrupting and potentially carcinogenic chemicals.”

Barrett and her colleagues, who have conducted several studies of adult product use, see a need for more information about student use patterns.

“Teenagers are a particularly interesting population to study because they are undergoing rapid changes, including in their hormone systems,” Barrett said. “It may be a sensitive period in which better product choices could reduce chemical exposure.”

Such products include soap, toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant, sunscreen, skin care products, fragrance and makeup. Some contain phthalates, parabens, phenols or other chemicals that may affect hormone signaling and cancer risk. Previous research has found that people who use more products tend to have higher levels of some of these chemicals in their bodies.

In this study, girls reported using a median of 14 products in the previous day, twice as many as boys. In addition to near-universal reports of using soap and toothpaste in the past day, 57% reported using fragrances, which often contain endocrine-disrupting phthalates that are not listed on labels. Overall product use among the students was comparable to levels reported in adult studies.

The students voiced some concern about potential chemical exposure, but few took steps to minimize it. Nineteen percent regularly read ingredient lists, and 5% regularly used an app or website intended to identify healthier products.

“Teenagers don’t read labels, it turns out,” said Moss-Wang, who was a sophomore at Princeton High School when the project began and is now a sophomore at Wellesley College.

The unusual collaboration began when investigators from the Rutgers Center for Environmental Exposures and Disease approached the Princeton High School research program in 2023. Moss-Wang and Kaputa joined the team, helped design the survey and urged the researchers to explore social media. They also prepared research ethics materials, created a recruitment video and flyers, visited classes and tracked responses. A second recruitment wave reached high school students in Rutgers summer programs.

“Barrett allowed us to manage the high school population outreach and data collection,” said Kaputa, now a junior at the University of Connecticut. “We identified interesting aspects of social media exposure within our student questionnaires.” Both students used the data for a three-year research project and became co-authors of the scientific paper.

The professional researchers, meanwhile, are conducting follow-up research with focus groups to learn which accounts, messages and influencers shape teenagers’ choices.

Larger studies across more diverse communities could test whether the pattern holds and could pair product inventories with urine samples that measure chemical exposure. Researchers also want to learn whether trusted online voices can steer adolescents toward safer choices.

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Gaby Clark

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Robert Egan

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