Federal Institute for Risk Assessment

Overview "Questions and Answers on Mineral Oil in Cosmetic Products"

What health risks are known regarding the absorption of mineral oils through the skin?

Considering all available lines of evidence it has to be assumed that mineral oil products are absorbed through the skin only in very small quantities, if at all.

Animal toxicity studies with long-term dermal exposure (subchronic toxicity) consistently showed no indications of health-damaging effects for saturated hydrocarbons (MOSH). After treatment with a petrolatum-paraffin wax mixture, slight eye irritations were observed in test animals; in humans slight skin redness occurred in individual cases after treatment. The sensitisation potential of mineral oil products is also low. In a study with 80,000 participants, it was shown that medicinal white oils have no sensitisation potential in human skin, which means they do not trigger allergies.

There are gaps in the data, however, which make a health risk assessment more difficult. These include data on uptake through the skin after contact over a long period, on oral bioavailability and on the relevance of histopathological changes in the liver (microgranules) which occurred in animal studies in a particularly sensitive strain of rats after feeding them the respective preparations. There have also been reports of a similar accumulation of MOSH in the human body associated with uptake through food, but these were non-inflammatory deposits with unclear clinical relevance. Little is currently known about the effects and occurrence of aromatic hydrocarbons (MOAH) in cosmetic products. An overall assessment is further complicated by data gaps regarding the composition of the mineral oil mixtures used by the cosmetics industry.

  Last changes 2025-02-11