Breathing In Your Shower Curtain
That new shower curtain smell? That's not fresh. That's over 100 different chemicals off-gassing into your bathroom—the smallest, most poorly ventilated room in your house. Add heat and moisture and it gets worse.
Most shower curtains are made from PVC—polyvinyl chloride. And to keep that PVC flexible, manufacturers load it up with phthalates. We're talking 16 to 39 percent of the curtain by weight. That's not a trace amount. That's a significant chunk of what you're hanging in your shower.
The EPA actually studied this back in 2002. They found that one new vinyl shower curtain can release elevated air toxins—toluene, ethylbenzene, phenol—for more than a month. Their recommendation? "Caution should be exercised when opening the bag of a newly bought shower curtain." So what are you going to do, open it up and hand it outside for a month? And you should know, when they say 30 days, they’re talking about other volatile organic compounds. Phthalates continue to leach out of PVC for the full lifetime of your shower curtain. For centuries, in fact. Yeah!
Now here's where it gets personal. Phthalates are anti-androgens. They block testosterone. Research has shown that DEHP, one of the main phthalates in shower curtains, is associated with a 4 percent decrease in anogenital distance in boys for every 10-fold increase in the DEHP urine concentration of the mother . The AGD is the distance between the anus and the genitals and is a marker of feminization that happens from exposure of a male fetus in the first trimester when the genitals are differentiating. A shorter AGD is linked with a shorter penis size, undescended testicles, and a lower sperm count. Things we might expect with blocked testosterone. That affects fertility, and it’s permanent in your little man because the blocking of testosterone by phthalates affects developing germ cells that program the formation of all sperm cells. These are human studies. So if you’re pregnant, get these out of your bathroom. There's also evidence in rats, listen to this, that a male's exposure to phthalates in the womb can travel further out on the family tree, affecting reproductive development in his sons and grandsons, because germ cells have been altered. Could this be why testosterone levels are still dropping in men by over 2% per year?
And it's not just developing babies. Studies in adult men link phthalate exposure to lower testosterone and reduced sperm quality.
The swap is easy. Tight weave organic cotton, or hemp shower curtains. No PVC, no phthalates, no off-gassing. And honestly? They last longer anyway. Wash them monthly and they don’t need a plastic liner. Save this so you’ll remember.