Guide · Oral care
Someone paid a lab to test 51 toothpastes and tooth powders for lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic. Forty-six of them came back with lead in them. Find yours below — then read why the worst one is the one you'd never suspect.
47 of the 51 are named here, plus two raw ingredients they tested on their own to see where it was coming from. The last four haven't been named yet by the lab.
Nobody broke a rule here. The FDA lets toothpaste contain up to 20,000 parts per billion of lead. The worst product on this page is 7,800. So legally, everything below is fine.
Now here's the thing that got me. The CDC says, in their own words: "No safe blood lead level in children has been identified." The EPA says the same. Not a low safe level. None. Kids show measurable damage at the smallest amounts anyone has bothered to measure.
And the FDA already knows how to write a strict lead limit when it wants to. In bottled water — which the FDA also regulates — the limit is 5 parts per billion. In toothpaste it's 20,000. Same agency, same mouth, four thousand times the difference.
The fair objection: you swallow water and you spit toothpaste, so the exposure isn't the same and nobody has measured how much you actually absorb. True. It still doesn't explain a four-thousand-fold gap in something small children swallow by accident every day.
So one part of the government says no amount of lead is safe for a child. Another part allows twenty thousand parts per billion of it in something my family puts in their mouth twice a day, every day, for their whole life.
Both of those can't be right. That's why the numbers below are compared against the limits from the Baby Food Safety Act instead — lead 5, cadmium 5, mercury 2, arsenic 10 — which is roughly what you'd assume already applied to a kids' product. It doesn't.
Everything is in parts per billion, lowest lead first. Type a brand to find yours. The bars are squashed so the small numbers still show up — trust the numbers, not the bars.
Every product over 3,000 ppb is a natural, fluoride-free tooth powder. That's not a coincidence.
All four of the worst ones are built on bentonite clay — the ingredient the natural brands put on the front of the package. Clay is dirt. It's dug out of the ground, and it carries whatever was in that ground. To check, the lab tested a few raw ingredients on their own, with no brand attached:
So it's the minerals themselves. The more a brand leans on "natural minerals" instead of the synthetic stuff, the more lead it tends to carry. The marketing says one thing and the lab report says the opposite.
Which is why you shouldn't make your own. That homemade toothpaste recipe that goes around every few months — bentonite clay, baking soda, coconut oil — is the recipe for the worst product on this page, with the fluoride taken out. I know it feels safer. It isn't.
Banned in food over there. Still in your mouth over here.
Seven products here contain titanium dioxide — on the label it's CI 77891. It does one job: it makes the paste look white. That's it. There's no dental reason for it.
In 2021 Europe's food safety agency said it could no longer be considered safe in food, because they couldn't rule out that it damages DNA. Europe banned it in food the next year. It's still allowed in toothpaste — there and here — because toothpaste counts as a cosmetic, not a food. Europe's own cosmetics panel has said the evidence isn't enough to rule out DNA damage in products people use daily, and named toothpaste.
Straight with you: the scientists disagree on this one. The FDA, Health Canada, Australia and the UK all looked at the same evidence and sided against Europe. Nobody has shown it hurts anyone. But strip all that away and you're left with this: Europe pulled it out of food, it's still in the stuff you put in your mouth twice a day, and it's only in there to make it look whiter. For a colour.
Keep the fluoride. It's the one thing in your bathroom with real evidence behind it. Four of the five products that came back totally clean have no fluoride in them — they're for toddlers who can't spit yet, not cavity protection. This chart will tempt you into trading a proven benefit for an unproven one. Don't take that trade.