I Went Down a Lead-Testing Rabbit Hole. Here’s What You Need to Know About Home Tests.

You’ve probably heard about potential lead contamination in tumblers, drinking water, chocolate, packaged lunches, and even baby food. The cause for concern is justified: Lead is a potent neurotoxin, and there’s no safe level to ingest. The metal is particularly harmful to childhood development.

The good news is that in the United States, lead can no longer be added to many common products, and instances of lead poisoning among children have declined significantly over the past several decades.

Yet lead still persists on stuff we come into contact with every day, like old paint, dishes, and water pipes. Lead can also show up in food products and cosmetics via contamination, as well as in cheap imported goods from countries with fewer regulations.

Unfortunately, if you are curious or concerned about lead being in something you own, most home-testing options are limited. Tests—even those recognized by the Environmental Protection Agency—have been difficult to use, prone to user error, and expensive per test.

But what if an instant, easy-to-use, precise, and readily available test existed, one that allowed users to conduct literally hundreds of tests at a much lower cost than traditional methods?

The better our ability to quickly and easily test for lead in our homes, the closer we are to eliminating the risk.

I had this question until I came upon a method that produces a neon-green glow when the metal is present. (You also may have seen lead-safety influencers popping up on your social media feeds promoting different ways of testing at home.) One such method is Lumetallix, which is sold as a simple kit, comprising a spray or droplet bottle and a UV flashlight. Just spritz or drop some testing liquid onto a surface, and then pass a UV light over it. If the surface glows neon green, then the surface contains lead.

Before you start scanning your vintage glassware and chipping paint, however, there are a few important things to remember about this method; they will help you test strategically, to keep you and your loved ones safe.

DIY lead test results with little user error

The problem with testing for lead at home is that most tests on the market have a high cost per test, and they’re time-consuming and fiddly (requiring swabs, pipettes, or test tubes). They can also occasionally deliver inaccurate results, and they can’t detect lead at very low thresholds that may still pose a health risk.

For years, the most widely available EPA-recognized lead test was 3M’s LeadCheck—a tube that you crack to activate (sort of like a glow stick), rub onto the test surface, and watch for a color change to indicate the presence of lead. For EPA recognition, this test required a professional to administer it.

3M no longer manufactures this test, but cheaper versions are widely available on Amazon. They typically contain an orange-yellow swab of the same chemical, and they are known for being unreliable, as The New York Times reported during the Stanley tumbler scare in January 2024.

Although the neon-green testing method used by Lumetallix is not (yet) EPA-recognized, it purportedly produces no false positives because the solution reacts only with lead. This method can detect as little as a single nanogram of lead, making it significantly more sensitive than swab tests, according to Lumetallix.

The test’s signature glow is due to a compound called methylammonium bromide in the kit’s spray or droplet bottle. Wim Noorduin, a chemist at the Dutch research center AMOLF who helped develop Lumetallix, told me in a video interview that this colorless salt bonds with lead crystals, if they’re present, to form a kind of compound known as a perovskite. These perovskites, when exposed to UV light with the included flashlight, act as a semiconductor and glow green, indicating that lead is present.

According to Noorduin, these methylammonium bromide tests are 10 times more sensitive than the D-Lead two-part solution tests recognized by the EPA (though D-Lead tests can reliably detect regulated lead-based paint on wood, iron alloy, drywall, and plaster surfaces).

 

Read the full article on www.nytimes.com