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 of the amazing coverage of our work so far this year!
Strawberry Shortcake lunchbox:
This is probably exciting news for Strawberry Shortcake fans and collectors out there: For all components tested (see details below), this vintage (1985) Strawberry Shortcake Strawberryland lunchbox (by Aladdin) was *unexpectedly* negative for Lead, Cadmium, Mercury, Arsenic, and Antimony! This is a RARE find and is especially unusual for vintage lunchboxes, or vintage items from 1985, and vintage Strawberry Shortcake collectibles! I did not get the matching thermos with it and so have not tested that part, although I imagine (based on my testing of vintage thermoses to date) it is likely positive for Lead (although could prove to be an anomaly like this lunchbox!).
The full XRF test results for the strawberry shortcake lunch box pictured are below (so please scroll down). Here are some links to additional reading that might be of interest, based on your interest in the test results of this item:
- Click here to see more lunchboxes we have tested.
- Click here to see more vintage items Lead Safe Mama has tested.
- Click here to see more Strawberry Shortcake items we’ve tested.
- And click here to learn about how Lead Safe Mama, LLC tests items.
Stay safe out there!
A quick note from Tamara
Hey readers — I hope you are staying well out there with all that is going on in the world right now. I’m hanging out at home with my children and have been doing so for 26 days now. I pulled them out of school over a week before things got wild just to be safe. Each of my three youngest sons have compromised immune systems (which manifests in different ways for each of them) due to having been Lead-poisoned as babies.
In between kid-wrangling, I am working hard to publish literally HUNDREDS of new articles (with test results for various consumer goods I have tested over the past couple of years, but have not yet had a moment to report on)! These pieces have created a backlog in my system for more than a year now and it’s actually nice to have a *break* with some time to catch up! To make this happen as quickly as possible, I am (as with this article) simply publishing the images and the test results without a lot of additional information. (Do not worry, I will continue to update them with more information as I get caught up and begin to have the time!)
For those new to my website, please check out the menu in the header of the website for more information about how I test things (and my background, etc). On each article you can also click on any of the keyword tabs at the top of the piece to find more items in that category. Here’s an overview discussing the type of testing Lead Safe Mama conducts and the specific instrument I use to detect, analyze, and confirm metals content, ultimately producing the resultant data for each item reported on the site — see the link here.
Please note: Test results reported below are science-based, accurate, and replicable. Test results reported here are from tests that were completed for a minimum of 60-seconds each and repeated multiple times (on each component of the item shown) to confirm the results. As with all the testing reported here on the website, a freshly-calibrated high-precision XRF instrument testing in Consumer Goods mode was used to test this item.
As always, please let me know if you have any questions.
Thank you for reading and sharing this work!
Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama
Amazon links are affiliate links. If you purchase something after clicking on one of these links, Lead Safe Mama, LLC may receive a small percentage of what you spend at no extra cost to you.
Test results for the Strawberry Shortcake Lunch box pictured:
On red strawberry:
- Iron (Fe): 739,700 +/- 5,500 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 151,500 +/- 2,000 ppm
- Chlorine (Cl): 108,400 +/- 5,700 ppm
On green leaf hat:
- Iron (Fe): 880,500 +/- 2,600 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 111,800 +/- 1,600 ppm
- Molybdenum (Mo): 200 +/- 131 ppm
- Cobalt (Co): 4,404 +/- 2,043 ppm
- Manganese (Mn): 2,381 +/- 819 ppm
On yellow banana hat:
- Iron (Fe): 744,300 +/- 4,700 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 146,200 +/- 1,800 ppm
- Chlorine (Cl): 108,600 +/- 4,800 ppm
On red plastic handle:
- Zinc (Zn): 163 +/- 23 ppm
- Iron (Fe): 841 +/- 85 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 556 +/- 194 ppm
On bare metal connectors of handle:
- Zinc (Zn): 824 +/- 278 ppm
- Nickel (Ni): 550,200 +/- 3,500 ppm
- Iron (Fe): 440,500 +/- 2,900 ppm
- Cobalt (Co): 6,611 +/- 1,545 ppm
- Manganese (Mn): 1.489 +/- 503 ppm
On white interior:
- Iron (Fe): 816,800 +/- 75,000 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 48,600 +/- 4,800 ppm
~ End ~
Scroll down for additional photos of this item.
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