Toxic chemicals keep showing up in fast fashion. This isn’t a coincidence.

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Reports keep surfacing about toxic chemicals in ultra fast fashion — and it’s pretty scary. Formaldehyde. Lead. Phthalates. Substances linked to cancer and fertility issues, showing up in clothes from Shein and Temu at rates that break EU safety limits.

But here's what a lot of coverage misses: This isn't only a Shein problem. It's a loophole problem, a regulation problem, and increasingly, a political problem, with the far right trying to co-opt legitimate health concerns for its own agenda.

This week, Amy spoke to experts and decoded complex legislation to help you understand how these chemicals reach our wardrobes and what you can do to reduce your exposure.

Thanks for reading! The full briefing follows for Founding Members, with a helpful preview summarising the latest laboratory test for all readers. 

Amy and JD

Last month, Greenpeace published a new report on the toxic chemicals in Shein’s clothes, stating 18 of 56 garments it tested from the retailer contained hazardous chemicals above the limits set by the European Chemicals Regulation (REACH). That’s more than double the 15% of tested clothes that broke the limits in a similar Greenpeace investigation back in 2022. 

Kate Hobson-Lloyd, Good On You’s fashion ratings manager, tells me: "This isn't just an abstract ecological concern; it is a direct threat to consumer health through daily exposure to hazardous substances.” 

The chemicals include phthalates, PFAS, heavy metals such as lead and cadmium, formaldehyde, and alkylphenol ethoxylates. Several are confirmed or suspected carcinogens — formaldehyde and certain PFAS compounds among them. Many are linked to impaired growth, fertility issues, and developmental harm in children. These are just some of the known hazards routinely showing up in items.

And the chemicals don’t just pose a risk to the wearer: they can be toxic to aquatic life, persist in the environment, and affect the garment workers handling items as they pass through manufacturing facilities, not to mention the health of those who live near factories (many are the garment workers themselves) if the chemical and water waste is not managed sufficiently.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating Shein too, and saw an opportunity to leverage its toxic clothes and their country of origin for the Trump administration’s far-right, anti-science “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda, which is known to fear-monger around health and wellbeing stories in mainstream culture. This one case just happens to be aligned with widespread concern about the dangers of toxic fashion, which keeps coming up again and again. 

Greenpeace’s recent report found that despite Shein initially removing items of concern flagged in previous tests, near-identical versions containing the same hazardous chemicals had since appeared on the site, likely from the same suppliers: “Given the extreme product range and vast supplier base, Shein appears unable to control the chemicals used in products sold on its platform,” the report states. 

Early in 2025, Shein claimed it was taking action to improve its chemical management by publishing a restricted substances list, increasing product testing, and no longer working with non-compliant suppliers. 

And it’s worth underscoring that while it gets a lot of the negative headlines, Shein isn’t the only brand guilty of selling clothes containing hazardous chemicals in dangerous concentrations. The same questions apply to competitors, too. Authorities in Seoul, for instance, have tested items from ultra fast fashion retailers including Shein as well as Temu and AliExpress throughout 2024. They found chemicals in wildly high concentrations, with one pair of shoes from Shein containing phthalates 229 times above the region’s legal limit. Another investigation, commissioned by CBC Marketplace in 2021, yielded similar results. 

So what’s going wrong? If brands have been caught out so publicly on so many times already, how does this keep happening?