Beware!! Pregnant Women Should Avoid Beauty Products.

Pregnant women should avoid using beauty products, scientists have warned. A common compound found in deodorant, lipstick and perfumes affects a mother's maternal care, new research suggests. Just a low exposure to the gender-bending chemical BPS was found to impair a mother’s ability to adjust to a child's needs.

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The findings are significant from an evolutionary perspective, the researchers say, as maternal behaviour affects survival chances. In a study on mice, scientists from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found a low exposure to BPS caused 10 percent of baby mice to die as a result of poor mothering.‘BPS affects maternal behaviour as well as maternally relevant neural correlates,’ authors Laura Vandenberg and Mary Catanese explained.

Along with impaired maternal care, they also found a ‘surprising increase incidence of infanticide’ in one group.Bisphenol S (BPS) was designed as a replacement for BPA after mounting concerns about the plastic compound’s effect on human health.But only a few studies have assessed the impact of BPS exposure despite its growing popularity in the past decade.

However, scientists believe that it is also an endocrine disruptor.In order to confirm its effects during pregnancy, the researchers exposed mice to the compound.The rodents were split into three treatment groups: no BPS, one low dose or two low doses.Their ability to build nests, care for their offspring and other maternal behaviours were monitored at three different time points.Two of the female offspring were mated with unexposed male mice and tested in the same way, in the study published in the journal Endocrinology.And to further examine the effects, brain regions believed to be important for maternal behaviour the rodents were scanned.They found among mice mothers who were exposed to low doses in utero, 10 per cent of their offspring died through a lack of care.