Influencers effective at helping Black women avoid toxic chemicals in products

New study shows social media influencers can increase knowledge among Black women about endocrine disrupting chemicals in beauty products that could harm their health.

Camille Smith used to talk a lot about her skincare routine on social media.

Then, more recently, the influencer and chemical engineer posted a new kind of Instagram reel. This time, she encouraged her followers to reduce the number of personal care products they use. “We all love our 30-step skincare routines, but we can limit it to four,” she said.

The questions from her audience came flooding in. “I think there was definitely a shock value,” Smith says. “But it was a shock that inspired curiosity.”

Smith’s post was part of a new study by Silent Spring Institute and the Resilient Sisterhood Project. The study was designed to evaluate whether engaging with social media influencers could increase people’s knowledge and motivate them to change their behaviors to limit their exposures to endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs).

Reporting in the Journal for Medical Internet Research, the researchers recruited seven Black women influencers to craft compelling public health messaging about EDCs and share their posts with their audiences on Instagram. EDCs are chemicals that interfere with the body’s hormones and can lead to a variety of health problems, including infertility, asthma, and cancer.

To assess whether the posts were effective, the researchers surveyed the influencers, and their audiences, before and after the posts were shared. Results of the survey showed that both the influencers and their followers knew more about the chemicals at follow-up than at baseline and had a greater intention to take steps to reduce their exposures.

Before the posts were published, only half of survey respondents said they always consider a product’s ingredients when shopping. At follow-up, that number jumped to 80 percent. What’s more, the number of respondents who said they would try to avoid specific chemicals like parabens, BPA, PFAS, and “fragrance” (which can include undisclosed EDCs) doubled.

Getting creative

Lead author Dr. Elissia Franklin, a research scientist at Silent Spring, says the study’s reliance on the creative expertise of influencers is unique. Influencers were required to attend a 60-minute workshop about EDCs, and then researchers asked them to independently determine the best way to convey that information to their audiences.

Some filmed themselves performing their personal care routines as they talked about what they learned. Others created carousels using original artwork and infographics. One influencer began with a personal story, sharing that she started using chemical hair straighteners when she was six years old.

The variety in approaches was exactly what the researchers had hoped for. “We didn't have our hand in the creative direction,” Franklin says. “We understood that if it’s true to the influencer’s brand, folks might be more likely to interact with it.”

While major healthcare centers and government agencies frequently share health information on their own social media channels, the researchers wanted to “meet people where they are,” says co-author Dr. Robin Dodson, an exposure scientist at Silent Spring.

“We didn’t want to just blast the message out on social media, hoping it would hit the right audience,” she explains. “We wanted to actively find our audience and try to connect with them directly.”

Black women have higher exposure to many EDCs because they often use personal care products, like hair relaxers, that contain these chemicals. Black women are also more likely to experience health conditions that have been linked to EDCs, including fibroids, infertility, early periods, breast cancer, and uterine cancer.

Franklin and Dodson wanted to share this information more broadly with Black women so they turned to influencers to help amplify the message. “Social media influencers are leaders in their digital communities and trusted messengers,” Franklin says. “We wanted to plug into those communities.”

Leading by example

The study was transformational for Smith, who has used her page to advertise products she now knows contain EDCs. Today, she thinks twice before she accepts sponsorships from skincare companies. In fact, she rarely posts about beauty products and focuses instead on wellness.

“I try to lead by example,” she says. “I used to fall into the aesthetic of ‘I need a cleanser, a toner, and an under-eye cream,’ but my content can't reflect that if I now know that’s not the best thing to do.”

Franklin hopes that eventually influencers like Smith will take that attitude one step further by challenging manufacturers to change their formulations. “In an ideal world, we would have fewer products with chemicals of concern in them because influencers are pushing back, saying, ‘Nope, I can't promote this on my page. Do you have a safer alternative?’” she says.

Franklin and Dodson plan to expand their project by engaging more influencers and on different platforms, potentially reaching hundreds of thousands or even millions of people.

Given the vastness of the social media landscape, “this project is infinitely scalable,” Dodson says. “Ultimately, this could have a real positive impact on Black women’s health.”

The research is part of a larger project called the POWER Study, funded by the Toxics Use Reduction Institute (TURI) via the Community Grant, the U.S. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH) and Office on Women’s Health (OWH) via the HHS Endocrine-Disrupting Chemicals (EDC) Innovator Award, and charitable contributions to Silent Spring Institute.