Estimating infants' and toddlers' inhalation exposure to fragrance ingredients in baby personal care products.

Fragrance ingredients are commonly added to many personal care products to provide a pleasant scent, including those intended for babies. While fragrance chemicals have a long history of safe use, at sufficiently high concentrations some may act as respiratory irritants or sensitizers. Little data have been reported on the inhalation exposures to fragrance compounds to infants and toddlers during bathing and lotion applications. This study demonstrates an in vitro method for measuring breathing zone air concentrations of fragrances from bath products and lotions. It employed simulated infant bathing and lotion application events and a robot to mimic a toddler's movement within a bathroom setting. The air concentrations in an infant's breathing zone were between <1 and 5 μg/m3 for each of seven common fragrance ingredients, while that in the breathing zone of toddlers in the bathroom was ≤ 1μg/m3. The air concentrations from the bathing additive were linearly related to their Henry's law constants and from the lotion inversely related to their octanol-air coefficients. The proposed approach can help refine risk estimates from inhalation exposure to fragrances used in baby products and guide future risk assessments of new products' safety for their use in baby bath products.