Fabric from brightly colored shirts, like the yellow (middle) and red (right) samples shown here, tended to release more bioaccessible lead from textiles than muted colors. Credit: Cristina Avello and Priscila Espinoza
Young children tend to put everything in their mouths, including their clothes. That’s not normally a big deal unless said clothing has large amounts of toxic ingredients—like lead. Now, preliminary research out of Marian University has found excessive levels of lead in children’s fast-fashion clothing.
Lead exposure is considered harmful at any level, potentially causing behavior problems, brain and central nervous system damage as well as other negative health effects. Children under 6 years old are considered most at risk from exposure.
Kamila Deavers, the principal investigator of the project, began studying lead contamination after her young daughter briefly showed elevated levels of lead in her blood from toy coatings, which happened before today’s strict federal lead limits were in place. Today, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission currently has a 100-parts-per-million (ppm) lead limit for children’s products like toys and clothing.
However, previous studies have found high levels of lead in the metal parts in some children’s clothing, such as zippers, buttons and snaps, which has led to product recalls. It has also been reported that manufacturers use lead(II) acetate as an inexpensive way to help dyes stick to the materials and produce bright, long-lasting color—which led Deavers to question its presence in the children’s version.
In their research, presented at the American Chemical Society’s Spring 2026 Meeting, Deavers and team tested 11 shirts from four retailers, including fast fashion and discount companies. All the tested shirts exceeded the U.S. federal regulatory lead limit of 100 ppm. Additionally, brightly colored textiles—like red and yellow—contained higher amounts of total lead than muted colors.
In a second experiment, the researchers simulated stomach digestion, calculating potential lead exposure and absorption from the tested items. They used the data to model the potential transfer during mouthing behavior—like sucking, holding or chewing on fabric—and the results suggest that such exposure would exceed the daily lead ingestion limit for children as set by the FDA.
Deavers says she hopes these initial results lead to more thorough screening of clothing items, and push the textile industry to find safer replacements to lead(II) acetate during the dyeing process.
Alternatives already exist to fix dyes to fabrics and keep them vibrant, including natural mordants from plants with high tannin contents such as oak bark, pomegranate peel and rosemary, and alum, an environmentally safe mordant.
“But if you want to change the clothing industry’s technology, that will cost a lot of money,” said Deavers. Without consumer or policy pressure on textile manufacturers to explore safer dyeing methods, there’s little incentive to switch.
Next, the researchers will study more shirts and examine their data to see if there is a relationship between the fabric’s lead levels and what children could absorb. They would also like to explore how laundering affects the lead(II) acetate, including whether washing contaminated clothing could spread it to other garments and how different detergents interact with it. For example, could it create a lead-containing scum inside the washing machine that would need to be removed to avoid releasing the contamination into wastewater?