Don't let kids play with vintage Avon pieces. This 1973 Elephant Perfume Pin contains 31,300 ppm Lead (90 is unsafe) and 492 Arsenic.

For those new to the Lead Safe Mama website:

Tamara Rubin is a multiple-federal-award-winning independent advocate for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety, and a documentary filmmaker. She is also a mother of Lead-poisoned children (two of her four sons were acutely Lead-poisoned in 2005).

Tamara owns and runs Lead Safe Mama, LLC — a unique community collaborative woman-owned small business for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety.
Since July of 2022, the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC has been responsible for five product recalls (FDA and CPSC).
All test results reported on this website are science-based, accurate, and replicable.
Please check out our press page to see some amazing coverage of our work so far this year!

The amount of Lead considered toxic in a newly manufactured item intended for use by children today is anything 90 ppm Lead or higher in the paint or coating, or anything 100 ppm Lead or higher in the substrate.

Vintage items (especially vintage plastic items, vintage jewelry, and costume jewelry in general) often contain very high levels of Lead and should never be given to children to play with.

I am almost 50-years-old and I clearly remember playing with these plastic perfume pins as a child (I was born in 1969 and this particular pin is from 1973, just about when it would have been interesting to me, as a four-year-old child)! Many friends my age are now grandmothers(!) — grandmothers who have held onto things from their childhood and pass items along to their children for their grandchildren to play with. Please think twice before doing this. These vintage items are decidedly not safe for children to play with — it literally takes just a microscopic amount of Lead to poison a child.

When tested with an XRF instrument (the same instrument used by the Consumer Product Safety Commission [CPSC] to determine if items are safe for use by children), this 1973 vintage Avon “Fragrance Glacé” perfume pin had the following readings (with a 2-minute/ 120-second test):

Focused on pink area of ear:

Lead (Pb): 10,900 +/- 100 ppm
Arsenic (As): 192 +/- 42 ppm
Chromium (Cr): 1,477 +/- 60 ppm
Zinc (Zn): 19 +/- 5 ppm
Titanium (Ti): 5,913 +/- 242 ppm
If a metal is not listed it was not detected by the XRF (unless otherwise noted, all testing conducted for this site is in “Consumer Goods” mode).

Focused on back metal pin: