One chemical at a time. What it is, where it turns up, what the regulators actually say about it, and which product categories leave it out. These pages exist because a single compound rarely stays in one aisle.
Why organise by chemical
PFAS is in cookware, dental floss, period underwear, waterproof jackets and food packaging. Phthalates are in fragrance, vinyl flooring and personal care. If you only ever read the cookware guide, you would never learn that the compound you were avoiding is also in four other things you own.
So these pages run across categories rather than within them. Each one covers a single compound end to end, then links out to every product guide where it appears.
What each chemical page covers
- What it is — the compound or family, in plain terms, without hand-waving.
- Where it appears — the product categories that use it and why it is there.
- What regulators say — EPA, FDA and state classifications, cited and linked.
- How exposure happens — the route that actually matters: skin, ingestion, inhalation, or none of them in normal use.
- What “free from” means on a label — which versions of the claim are meaningful and which are marketing.
- Which products avoid it — links to the relevant category guides.
The naming problem
Chemical families are routinely collapsed into one another in marketing copy, and the result is claims that are technically true and practically misleading.
PFOA is not PTFE. PTFE is a PFAS. Teflon is a brand name, not a compound. All four get used interchangeably, and a pan can honestly claim to be free of the first while being coated in the second. The HexClad audit is the clearest worked example of what that ambiguity costs a buyer.
Each page here names the specific compound rather than the family, states which claim it satisfies, and says plainly what it does not cover.
On dose and exposure
Presence is not exposure, and exposure is not harm. A compound bound inside a solid material behaves differently from the same compound in a spray you breathe. Where the route of exposure is the deciding factor, we say so rather than treating every detection as equivalent.
Nothing here is medical advice. If you have a diagnosed condition, a sensitivity or a specific exposure concern, that is a conversation for a clinician, not a website.
Every classification cited belongs to the body that published it and is linked at the point of use. Read our methodology.