Two years ago, I shared a post on how aluminum chlorohydrate makes invasive cancer cell crawl 4x further. Here was the study:

The higher the bars are, the further distance breast cancer cells travelled.

With 100uM of aluminum chlorohydrate (number 5), authors report that breast cancer cells moved 4x further than without aluminum.

Now, here’s the other piece of the puzzle I didn’t share at the time: how much of antiperspirants actually gets absorbed through the skin?

This is a clinical pharmacokinetic study performed in 12 healthy women.

Conclusion? Authors estimate as much as 0.06% of the aluminum chlorohydrate gets into your body. Now that may sound very low, but I calculated the end result.

A typical antiperspirant contains 15% aluminum chlorohydrate.

With daily usage of 1g, of which 15% is aluminum chlorohydrate, and 0.06% of that in 1mL –

That is about 500uM in concentration.

This is 5x higher than the concentration that was used in the first research paper–the one that showed that this amount was enough to make breast cancer cells crawl 4x further.

The amount of aluminum in antiperspirants is definitely high-risk.

The best worst thing: I tried sharing this on Reddit just now and as a punishment, Reddit permanently banned my account. So I realize why Reddit is full of people who say antiperspirants are 100% safe–because if you share evidence against it, you get banned.

source: Darbre, et al. Effect of aluminium on migratory and invasive properties of MCF-7 human breast cancer cells in culture,
Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry, Volume 128, 2013, Pages 245-249.

de Ligt, R., van Duijn, E., Grossouw, D., Bosgra, S., Burggraaf, J., Windhorst, A., Peeters, P.A.M., van der Luijt, G.A., Alexander-White, C. and Vaes, W.H.J. (2018), Assessment of Dermal Absorption of Aluminum from a Representative Antiperspirant Formulation Using a 26Al Microtracer Approach. Clinical And Translational Science, 11: 573-581. https://doi.org/10.1111/cts.12579