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!

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? 

The issue is closely linked with loopholes in EU legislation and shipping low-value items from China using a direct-to-customer model, too. The whole thing is pretty complicated, but essentially, the likes of Zara and H&M import their products to Europe in a bulk shipment before sending out orders from regional distribution centres, which makes them legally responsible for a products’ safety, including testing and compliance documentation. It’s therefore less likely that a product containing dangerously high concentrations of chemicals will reach a shopper’s doorstep. Shein and Temu, meanwhile, ship individual items from outside the EU and there’s simply no way for customs to check every single package because there are billions entering the region every year, so enforcement and testing is extremely difficult.

Hobson-Lloyd notes that “While Shein serves as a critical case study for an ultra fast fashion brand that benefits from the ‘de minimis’ loophole, we must acknowledge that chemical mismanagement is actually a systemic issue across the entire fashion industry.”

Toxic chemicals are a mechanism of fashion in the same way that the proliferation of synthetic fibres is: they’re cheaper than the safer, lower impact alternative. They help producers keep costs low and production high, all the while exposing workers and wearers to a mostly invisible risk. It echoes something Kristian Hardiman, Good On You’s head of ratings, said in an article first published in 2022: “Unfortunately when it comes to chemicals, it is possibly one of the most greenwashed issues. For some brands, it is done out of naivety, whilst with others it is more malicious.” 

One way to curb the systemic issue is through regulation, a method that activists are increasingly calling for to address many of fashion’s other problems, too. Greenpeace says binding and enforceable legislation is the only way to help reduce the risk of hazardous chemicals entering the EU, and its report calls for: “applying EU chemicals legislation to all products sold within the EU, including those offered by online platforms; making platforms legally liable under EU law for any breaches; allowing authorities to suspend platforms in cases of repeated violations.” 

The organisation is also demanding anti-fast-fashion laws globally, with a levy for fast fashion, a ban on advertising, and greater support for circular business models.

Similar issues around hazardous chemicals persist in other industries like skincare and cosmetics, and the demand from activists like author and environmental health expert Lindsay Dahl is the same: “We need an urgent, bipartisan and unified strategy, because the consumer and social media forces warping our thinking aren’t going anywhere,” Dahl said in a Business of Fashion op-ed published in August 2025.

In the meantime, consumers can’t help but worry. Because like the mass of discarded textiles that continues to accumulate in the Global South, toxic fashion leaves many shoppers feeling helpless and heavy with the weight of personal responsibility. “I feel like such a failure of a mum. I've been dressing my babies in toxic clothes… I am literally drowning in parental guilt right now,” wrote one Reddit user on learning about Shein’s record. 

Not having the means to find out exactly what’s in our clothes is at best frustrating, and at worst dangerous and potentially contributory to the “crunchy-to-alt-right pipeline”. 

What can you really do about it? Opting for organic and undyed materials can go some way to avoiding the issue, but you should still make sure the brands you buy from are doing the deeper supply chain work, because as Hobson-Lloyd notes, simply publishing logos and loose claims on a label or website isn’t enough. 

“Many brands now claim to manage chemicals use in their supply chains by publishing Restricted Substance Lists (RSLs) or Manufacturing Restricted Substance Lists (MRSLs), but these documents are ultimately just pieces of paper unless there is transparent evidence of enforcement,” she explains. “Effective chemical management can be demonstrated by participating in leading initiatives such as the ZDHC and, crucially, reporting on the actual percentage of supplier compliance.”

Certifications are important for holding brands to account — on product pages, look out for Bluesign and Oeko-Tex, two notable standards. But, Hobson-Lloyd says: “It is important that brands disclose specific statements to demonstrate which materials or products are compliant, rather than simply logo-slapping and making vague promises which can further confuse consumers.”

There are signs some governments have had enough of Shein and are moving to curtail it, though these investigations are more about the retailer’s practices and questionable product categories on offer: the European Commission and French prosecutors are separately looking into the platform’s sale of illegal products, in particular banned weapons and “childlike” sex dolls. It’s not going to be easy, though: this past Friday, a Paris court rejected the state’s request to suspend Shein’s website in France, calling it “disproportionate” to the retailer’s actions. 

The uncomfortable truth is that individual vigilance can only get you so far when the system itself is designed to obscure what's in your clothes. Real change will come from binding regulation, not better shopping. 

You can’t possibly lab-test every t-shirt before you buy it. But knowing what to look for — certifications, disclosures, and generally following the research — can help you make more informed choices. And for now, that means avoiding the brands that keep getting caught selling toxic products.