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Temporary tattoos or henna tattoos have grown in popularity exponentially over the years. What was once a way for people in Egypt and India to prepare for religious ceremonies is now a tool for people to express themselves in everyday life. But are henna tattoos safe? We’ll find out today.Welcome to another episode of Skincare Secrets… The average adult uses 9 personal care products each day, with 126 unique chemical ingredients. We used to think that anything applied to the skin would always just remain on the surface and the only thing we had to worry about if we had a reaction was local skin irritation. But over recent decades, we've started to recognize that some topically applied substances can penetrate into or even through human skin and end up circulating throughout our bodies.For example, let’s take the toxic heavy metal lead. To see if lead could be absorbed through the skin into the body, researchers in Australia applied lead to someone's left arm and then they measured the level of lead in the sweat coming off their right arm. Low and behold in the next few days they saw a big spike in lead levels coming out of the subjects right arm. And this study was done over 30 years ago, we’re talking 1988, so way back then researchers proved that lead can be absorbed through the skin and rapidly distributed throughout the body.This led public health authorities, like the CDC, to recommend that parents avoid using cosmetics, at least on their children, that could be contaminated with lead. Lead has been found in a wide range of cosmetic products because it's a natural constituent of many color pigments. The FDA has set an upper limit for lead at 20 parts per million. Now, only some samples of henna exceeded that limit but because henna is used for temporary tattoos these quantities of lead can remain on the skin for a long time and may not be safe.Studies show that lead may have no identifiable safe exposure level with even the lowest levels shown to affect the brains of developing children, thus the use of henna, especially among children, may be a health risk. Now, traditionally henna was just made out of dried powdered leaves of a plant. But more recently, other ingredients have been added to give it a stronger color. And one of them, you guessed it, is lead. Now even though lead is bad and one of the most common additives to henna, it’s not THE most common and is not as bad as PPD. PPD stands for para-phenylene-diamine -  a coal tar derivative that can cause nasty skin reactions such as blistering and scarring. The red paste traditionally used, known as "red henna," rarely produces adverse effects since it’s made only with dried leaves. But to achieve a darker pigment, known as "black henna”, people use additional ingredients, including lead and PPD.PPD is added to speed up the process of the colors setting into the skin. From as long as 12 hours, down to less than 2 hours. So while the use of black hennas may be tempting, it has the potential for both short- and long-term side effects. There's no such thing as natural black henna, so perhaps it would be best to respect the more traditional practices and stick with red henna. The problem is that PPD can be found in products labeled as red henna too, so just because it's red doesn't mean it's not risky. And because people would manipulate information like this, according to the FDA, you shouldn’t apply henna to your skin at all.Now that may sound a bit drastic to some of you that enjoy the practice but the bottom line here is that you should definitely be careful before applying henna and make sure that you know what it is made of. Thank you for tuning in to another episode. That’s all for today. Hope you liked it. Make sure to subscribe and I will see you in the next one.