Lead Safe Mama and the other voices we follow

First, the thing you probably came here for

We are not Lead Safe Mama. If that is who you were looking for, her site is tamararubin.com, and you should go there — she is the right person for lead questions and we are not.

We get search traffic for her name because our names are similar and we cover overlapping ground. Rather than quietly absorbing that traffic, we would rather tell you plainly who she is, what she does that we do not, and send you onward.

Who Tamara Rubin is, and why her work is different in kind

Tamara Rubin is an independent advocate for childhood lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety, and a documentary filmmaker. She came to the work the hard way: two of her sons were acutely lead-poisoned in 2005.

Since 2009 she has used XRF (X-ray fluorescence) instrumentation — the same class of technology the Consumer Product Safety Commission uses — to test consumer goods for heavy metals: lead, cadmium, mercury, antimony and arsenic. She is factory-trained and certified on the instrument, and she publishes the readings.

That is a materially different activity from what we do, and the distinction matters when you are deciding who to ask.

She generates primary data. She points an instrument at an actual object and reports what it says. Since July 2022 that work has been credited with prompting six FDA and CPSC product recalls, and Consumer Reports profiled her work in February 2023.

We do editorial research. We read ingredient panels, regulatory filings and published testing, and we assemble that into buying guidance. We do not own an XRF instrument and we do not run a lab.

So: if your question is "does this specific plate, mug, toy or lunchbox contain lead," that is a testing question, and she is the one with the instrument. If your question is "what should I generally look for in dinnerware," that is an editorial question and we have a page for it.

To be explicit: we have no affiliation with Lead Safe Mama, LLC, and nothing here is endorsed by Tamara Rubin. We link to her because her work is good, not because there is any arrangement.

The others worth knowing

Mamavation commissions independent laboratory testing of consumer products — sending real samples to EPA-certified labs to test for things like phthalates and indicators of PFAS. Like Tamara Rubin's work, this produces primary data rather than opinion, and it covers categories nobody else is testing.

Gimme the Good Stuff has been writing non-toxic product guides since 2010, across baby gear, cleaning and personal care. Closer to what we do — editorial research rather than lab work — and they have been at it longer.

The Environmental Working Group runs the large ingredient databases: Skin Deep, the cleaning guide, the sunscreen guide. Genuinely useful, and we have written about where we think their cleaning database falls short — disagreement that we hope reads as taking the work seriously rather than dismissing it.

Why we are sending you elsewhere

A reasonable question, given that we are a site that would prefer you stayed.

Two reasons. The first is practical: when someone tests objects with an instrument and we do not, pretending otherwise would be a bad answer to a question about your child's dinner plate. The failure mode of this whole category is confident writing that is not backed by anything, and the correction is to be clear about where our knowledge stops.

The second is that this is a small field of mostly independent people, several of whom got into it because something happened to their own children. Treating each other as competitors to be out-ranked would make all of it worse. We would rather be the page that tells you who to ask.

If you came here for lead specifically, start with lead at home for the buying side — and go to Tamara for the testing.