PFAS in the luluemon leggings??

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]We're at the Lululemon. We're getting the leggings. Everyone's saying that there's POS in these leggings. I think there's a lawsuit. Let's check it for ourself. Massec everything style. Go to the store. Let the wife choose the right color. Get some of the leggings. Um, and then we are going to go ahead and take these to a real POS lab on campus. I don't really do POS in my lab. First opportunity for you guys to see some triple quad quantitation work with all the validation, the, you know, the EPA method. All right, the Lullemon. We're going to extract it and then filter these wax Oasis cartridges and we're going to do a water control in the same container. So, good controls, proper POS extraction. This is the way to do things for reals, guys. 500 mls of water. And then this is going to be my I've rinsed them both out with clean water.

[00:00:48]Right. So, in the big one, I'm going to put the pants.

[00:00:53]All right. And then this is the clean water. I'm totally not going to turn it, but we're leaving the tag on. All right, we're going to go ahead and shove them in with the tag. Wow, they soaked up the water almost instantly. This is some sort of incredible plastic fabric. I mean, fabric. And look at that. And then we're just going to ring them out. This is good science, guys. So, we squeezed out the water and you can tell I mean compare I mean that's I mean noticeably it's got some sort of tinge to it.

[00:01:23]noticeable tinge, but you know, we're looking for peas.

[00:01:28]And that's clear, clean water. And that's the Lullemon straight from the store, rinsed with water.

[00:01:41]I'd wash these. I mean, I guess you should wash your tights first. Look at I mean, look at this. So, we're in the hood. Clearly, there is a tinge on that water compared to the clean water. We lost about 100 mls or so water, but I might have glued it out. It's fine. It's still in the pants, whatever. And then we're going to filter it. It's going be a slow long drip process through these wax aways as far as what is it? 5 mls a minute. So slow. So that's what 100 minutes. This is dedication, guys. This is a massivist by bedman. Uh 10 mil.

[00:02:15]We're going to do 15 mil. So I'm doing seven 7.5 twice.

[00:02:22]Ethanol methanolic ammonium hydroxide.

[00:02:25]How much meth? 1% very very little methanol in your ammonium hydroxide.

[00:02:30]All right. I got a feel for this thing.

[00:02:32]Dang. Look at that action, dude. Oh man.

[00:02:36]All right. I'm going do the rest of it without the camera in my hand. That That's some That's some impressive pipetman skills. He's dripping a little bit. Crack the vacuum. You don't want too much sucking power.

[00:02:46]cracked it and then we're going to see.

[00:02:51]And then that applies the vacuum. We go just a teeny bit of pressure. We're looking for slow drips.

[00:03:00]Precondition them. And with this uh this 1% and then we're going to go formic acid. Actually, we're going to do the.3 molar formic acid here. Same thing. Wash it. Wash it. And then we'll start filtering.

[00:03:16]the real samples. We're doing it on the triple quad this time, guys. We're using isotopically labeled peos standards and spiking them into both solutions. We're doing it for reals this time. Regular water on the right.

[00:03:30]All right, there we go. The uh dirty Lululemon pants water spike to internal standards.

[00:03:39]Like notice it really got a color to it.

[00:03:42]All right.

[00:03:45]Everyone remember on the left we did internal standards for extraction efficiency. They go in before into both samples and then we're going to spike in just internal calibration standards at the end. Um so we can see how good of a job we did on filtration here and I threw an L on it. There's no way we're going to forget which one's which.

[00:04:06]Wellington Labs kind of runs the game in PEOS world. And so these are the injection standard mix just for your knowledge. And these are the extraction standard mix. This is the EPA method launching labs.

[00:04:20]This is the agile system. It's got this 1290. This is the same as like the 1260 basically front end up UPLC. This is the PFC free though. I'm assuming that's POS free. And then it's on to the LC triple.

[00:04:35]This is the classic Agyant and Buger front end. Since they've powered nerved a long time ago, they got the same front end with the glass capillary that you got to pull out and then slide back in into these really tight gold O-rings.

[00:04:50]Incredibly, I don't know how nerve-wracking would you say it is to clean. No one ever wants to clean this guy. Um, but anyways, yeah. So, and then that's triple quad, right? So, triple quad for known masses of the POS only.

[00:05:02]other mod. No degasser. Bypassing the degasser because of the teflons are cuz the uh teflon filters could cause contamination. This is the precolum. I guess just it's just a regular C8 on your pumps for environmental POS contamination in your solvents or anything on your system. So these peaks will be delayed and filtered out. And so you'll know the difference between uh the real stuff from your sample and the fake stuff in the room. Right off the agelant triple quad, we got the PEOS data. PEOS data. So the first thing you check are the surrogate spiked in before filtration. And you want a line that's just right at zero there cuz that shows you you got basically the same area for your blank as your sample for these surrogate POS type molecules that are heavily labeled. And that lets you know that your extraction efficiency was good. And it looks like we're good on extraction efficiency. Specifically for this project, we're looking for this PF OA. This is the octinoic acid perforinated. This is what's used in a lot of upholstery upholsteries and fabrics. This PFNA uh again kind of water resistant repellent textile treatments. And then any of these uh per floral hexane sulfanate structures. These are PFAS, PFHAS type stuff. Uh so we're going to see what we find. HS first first looking at the quant curve. Looks pretty linear. So I think we can use this one for actually for quant. And so let's see what is the concentration the general story. So here we got the sample the Lulu versus the water blank. We got 06. So five signal noise almost basically nothing versus 196 which is at 697 ppt. So detected in parts per trillion. Then we got to about calculate based on volume to get the real concentration. Uh but that's way higher. What is that? That's almost 20.

[00:07:02]That's almost 40 times higher than the blank PFOA.

[00:07:07]It's the calibration level doesn't go low enough for to confirm quantitation, but you can see that we do have more count. So again there that's like 216 versus 40 in the blank. The blank's kind of high. So, uh, it definitely is in there, but we can't quant the PFOA. We look at the peak the peaks versus each other. So, that's the peak in the leggings, and then that's the peak in the blank. So, clearly blank leggings.

[00:07:38]I mean, definitely PFOA. We just can't form it. We go. So, this is the PFNA.

[00:07:44]PFNA. And then we have that's the the real uh in the background. So we definitely kind of ugly peak but definitely signal for sure. See it's there. And then based off area we're at like 403 versus 14. So 14 is essentially nothing. And so again in the 6 or so PPT range on the PFNA to wrap up. Looks like we have hits on three pretty general POS categories. The PFOA, the PFNA, and the PF HXS. They're they're, you know, pretty good hits. They are at I mean pretty low levels, but they're they're in the they're in the textile and we just dip this stuff in water pretty quickly. All right, so that brought some blue lumine, but still got the samples in case uh there's a lot of interest for me to run on targeted. Still got him.