Introduction to Tamara (for those new to the site!)
Tamara Rubin lives in Portland, Oregon and is a child health advocate, author, documentary filmmaker, and mother of four sons. Her young men are now 24, 18, 15, and 12. She has won multiple national awards for her Lead-poisoning prevention advocacy work (including two from U.S. government agencies). As of November 15, 2020, she has had more than 1.5 million unique individual readers visit her blog in the past 12 months (with over 3.5 million page views!) – from more than 200 countries (per Google Analytics) around the world!
It is with the help, support, and participation of these readers that she conducts and reports on independent testing of consumer goods for toxicants (Lead, Mercury, Arsenic, Cadmium, and Antimony), using high-accuracy X-Ray Fluoresence analysis (read more about that here). She goes by #LeadSafeMama on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram and has over 2,500 separate posts of information (mostly consumer goods test results) on her blog at LeadSafeMama.com.
Tamara’s advocacy work has been mentioned in print in The New York Times; the New York Post; Mother Jones; Parents Magazine; Vice.com; MNN.com; TruthOut; WebMD; the Huffington Post,;USA Today; Grok Nation, and more (too many outlets to list!) – and in other media (T.V. and radio), on the Today Show; Kids in the House; Al Jazeera English; The Voice of Russia; CBS This Morning, and through news stories on CBS; ABC; NBC, and even Fox News – as well as in countless podcasts and other interviews.
Continue reading below the image.
Test results for Sundance Pony G1 (first generation) My Little Pony (MLP) figurine.
Here’s a link to the My Little Pony Wiki Page for the doll pictured. Below are the XRF test results for the doll pictured. To date, all of the My Little Pony dolls that I have tested (both vintage and new) have been negative for Lead.
XRF focused on pink hearts of cutie mark
30-second test
- Silver (Ag): 10 +/- 5 ppm
- Zinc (Zn): 539 +/- 57 ppm
- Indium (In): 23 +/- 9 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 17,200 +/- 2,600 ppm
XRF focused on blue of eye
60-second test
- Palladium (Pd): 10 +/- 3 ppm
- Zinc (Zn): 966 +/- 60 ppm
- Copper (Cu): 284 +/- 44 ppm
- Iron (Fe): 710 +/- 143 ppm
- Indium (In): 31 +/- 8 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 155,000 +/- 4,600 ppm
XRF focused on plain white of pony
60-second test
- Silver (Ag): 12 +/- 4 ppm
- Zinc (Zn): 626 +/- 53 ppm
- Copper (Cu): 103 +/- 43 ppm
- Indium (In): 26 +/- 8 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 9,328 +/- 899 ppm
XRF focused on pony’s pink hair
60-second test
- Silver (Ag): 15 +/- 3 ppm
- Nb: 1,752 +/- 37 ppm
- Bromine (Br): 17 +/- 3 ppm
- Palladium (Pd); 12 +/- 3 ppm
- Gold (Au): 68 +/- 29 ppm
- Platinum (Pt): 166 +/- 34 ppm
- Zinc (Zn): 84 +/- 17 ppm
- Copper (Cu): 119 +/- 29 ppm
- Indium (In): 43 +/- 7 ppm
- Titanium (Ti): 1,955 +/- 304 ppm
Some additional reading that might be of interest:
- To see more My Little Pony type dolls I have tested, click here.
- To see more vintage toys I have tested, click here.
- To read more about the concern for Lead in toys, click here.
- To learn about the testing methodology used for all of the test results reported on this blog, click here.
- IF you are NEW to this blog, please watch this video about how to navigate the more than 2,600 posts with information and resources!
- Can I test my toys myself at home?
As always, thank you for reading and for sharing my posts. Please let me know if you have any questions and I will do my best to answer them personal (as soon as I have a kid-free moment, moments that are currently few and far between because I have not had childcare since March – at the beginning of the pandemic!)
Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama 
Interesting. Have you tested cabbage patch kids? I have a couple boxed up from my childhood…hesitant to let my daughter play with them.