Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Hype About Phthalates

About 6 months ago, I was speaking with a woman who worked for a company that was testing food storage containers for phthalates. I asked her what a phthalate was (I had honestly never heard of this word) and she explained to me that it was a compound chemical used to soften the hardest plastics, and was used in products such as food storage containers, children's toys, and sex toys! Sex toys?? Couldn't be.... if phthalates are harmful, why would they put them into sex toys, which are used on our most intimate and sensitive parts of the body!?! This question is EXACTLY why the use of phthalates of become quite the controversy in the adult toy industry. Since I feel it is important to keep my readers informed, I decided to do a little bit of research on the topic(click on the links to see the whole articles I received my research from)... here is what I found.....


It started between years 1997 and 2005 when it was being discovered by both doctors and research teams that there were multiple phthalates in peoples urine, and that there was a direct link between children's allergies, birth defects, and adult infertility, and the use phthalates in common products such as perfume, pesticides, children's toys, etc... After about seven years, in 2004, the European Union banned the use of several phthalates in the manufacturing of children's toys. However, in the United States there is no law in place to ban those uses, just like there is no regulation on the manufacturing of sex toys and their companies by the United States Government.

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