Your Hormones Have Opinions About Your Shampoo

You wake up, moisturize, spray on perfume, grab a coffee in a to-go cup with a plastic lid, tap your card at checkout and pocket the paper receipt out of habit, then reheat last night's leftovers in the same plastic container you packed them in. Nothing about it looks risky. It's just a normal Tuesday.

And yet, somewhere in those two hours, your body has quietly absorbed a handful of compounds it never asked for and doesn't quite know what to do with. Substances that mimic, block or scramble the signals your hormones use to run almost everything, from your metabolism to your mood to your fertility. They have a name, endocrine disruptors, and if you're anything like most of my clients, you've heard the term once or twice and filed it under things I probably can't do much about. I want to gently push back on that.

What they actually are

An endocrine disruptor is anything that gets in the way of how your hormones are made, sent out, used, or cleared. Some act as impostors, sneaking into a hormone receptor and fooling your cells into responding as if the real hormone had arrived. Some just block the real thing from getting through. Others quietly shift how much of a hormone your body makes, or how fast it gets rid of it. What surprises people most when I say this out loud: none of this needs a big dose. Hormones work in tiny amounts by design, which is exactly why something mimicking them can throw things off even at low levels.

Chances are you already know some of these by name, you just haven't connected the dots. BPA in certain plastics. Phthalates, which keep plastic soft and fragrance lasting longer. Parabens in skincare. PFAS in non-stick pans and stain-resistant fabric. Triclosan in some antibacterial products.

What it can actually touch

Not one dramatic symptom, and that would be an easier article to write if there were one. It's more of a quiet influence across several systems at once:

• Thyroid function that runs a touch sluggish, or a touch wired, without an obvious reason

• Skin, cycles or energy shifting in ways sleep and diet alone don't fully explain

• A fertility journey taking longer than expected, for reasons nobody can quite name

• Weight or metabolism behaving differently than it used to, with no real change in habits

• Kids in the household hitting puberty earlier than their parents did at the same age

I want to be careful here, because this is the part where it's tempting to connect every symptom to every possible cause. One item on that list doesn't mean endocrine disruptors are your answer. Sleep, stress, nutrition and genetics all play into the same picture, and no bullet list can untangle that for you. What the research does show fairly consistently is that everyday exposure, added up across a population and over years, tracks with these patterns. That's a more honest claim than "your candle is making you sick."

How I think about this with clients: support the system, don't fight the world

Your body isn't defenceless here. It has a liver built to break these compounds down, and a gut built to help carry them out. That's genuinely where I start with people, not with a list of everything to fear.

The liver side. Your liver processes foreign compounds, hormones included, in two main steps, and the second one is the one that matters most here. It attaches a small molecule to the compound so it becomes water-soluble enough to actually leave your body, through urine or bile. Cruciferous vegetables, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, brussels sprouts, contain compounds that genuinely support this step. Not a detox tea claim, just documented biochemistry, and a plate of vegetables most of my clients already like.

The gut side. Once your liver has tagged something for the exit, your gut bacteria get a say in what happens next. Certain bacterial enzymes can effectively untag it before it leaves, sending it straight back into circulation instead of out the door. A gut that's working reasonably well, enough fibre, enough variety in what you eat, tends to favour the exit route over the round trip. It's one more reason gut health keeps coming up in nearly every consultation, not only the ones about anxiety.

The nutrient side. Selenium, zinc and iodine all play a direct role in making and converting thyroid hormone, and the thyroid happens to be one of the systems most sensitive to this kind of exposure. Please don't start supplementing blindly. These are reasonable things to have checked if your energy or your metabolism has shifted for no clear reason, before you assume it's simply willpower.

The part that's harder to put a number on. There's a specific kind of tired I see in clients once they realise the air, the water bottle and the receipt in their bag might all be quietly working against them. It shows up as a low-grade helplessness, the sense that the problem is everywhere, so there's no honest place to even begin. That feeling deserves to be named before it gets fixed. The point isn't to eliminate every source, because that isn't realistic and it isn't healthy to chase. It's permission to take back a sense of choice over the handful of things that are actually yours to decide, and let that be enough for now.

Where I'd start, if I were you

Not every exposure carries equal weight, and not all of them deserve equal effort. If you only change a few things, make it these.

Stop microwaving food in plastic. Move your leftovers into glass or steel instead. Heat is what makes plastic release the most.

Swap non-stick pans for stainless steel or cast iron, especially the ones with the coating already scratched off.

Reach for fresh food over canned or heavily packaged when it's easy, not every meal, just more often than not. One study I mention to clients often had people eat only fresh, unpackaged food for three days, and by the end their BPA and phthalate levels had dropped by more than half. You don't need to hit that bar daily to benefit from leaning that direction.

Take the digital receipt if offered. Thermal paper is a surprisingly reliable source of BPA, more so if your hands are damp or you've just used hand sanitizer.

Look at your skin before you look at your plate. Skin absorbs straight into the bloodstream, bypassing the liver's first pass entirely, which is exactly why it's worth starting there.

On skincare specifically, because I get asked about this constantly

Your bathroom shelf is probably the easiest place to make a real difference, and also the easiest place to feel completely overwhelmed. So let's keep it simple. You don't need to replace everything this weekend.

Fewer products, used consistently, beats more products used here and there. A shorter routine also means fewer chances for phthalates, often hidden under the word "fragrance" or "parfum" on a label, and parabens to quietly add up over your day.

If you're going to watch for anything specific, watch for parabens, phthalates, and oxybenzone in sunscreen. Those three are among the more studied, and among the easiest to avoid once you know to look. Fragrance-free isn't the same as unscented, by the way, it usually just means fewer undisclosed synthetic compounds, not fewer nice smells.

You don't have to memorise any of this yourself. A few apps exist specifically to scan a barcode and tell you, in plain language, what's actually in a product. Yuka and INCI Beauty are the two I hear about most, especially from my French clients, both free, both let you scan something before it even goes in your basket. EWG's Healthy Living app, built on their Skin Deep database, is the English-language equivalent I point people to most often, and it's been rating personal care products for over two decades now. Think Dirty does something similar and comes up a lot with clients who've lived in North America, and OnSkin is worth a look too, it scans both skincare and household products and works well for an international audience that isn't necessarily shopping in France or the US.

One thing worth knowing before you lean on any of them: their scoring systems simplify something genuinely complicated. Dose, how often you use a product, your own sensitivity, none of that fits neatly into a letter grade or a colour. Treat the score as a starting point, don't clear your whole shelf over it.

And this one goes against what people expect from a naturopath: don't chase the word 'natural' on a label either. Natural doesn't automatically mean gentler, and some plant extracts irritate skin or disrupt hormones just as effectively as synthetic ones do. Read the ingredient list. Ignore the front of the bottle.

That said, simpler is often genuinely better. Jojoba oil is close to what your own skin already produces, so most skin types tolerate it well as a moisturiser. Coconut oil works beautifully on body skin and hair, though it can clog pores on the face for some people, worth a patch test first if you're acne-prone. Shea butter is a solid choice for anything dry, elbows, heels, winter skin. Rosehip oil is worth knowing for texture and fine lines. Aloe vera gel earns its reputation for anything irritated or sun-exposed. None of these need a ten-step routine or a chemistry degree, and none of them come with a hidden ingredient list.

Not zero. Just lower.

Here's the part that matters more than anything else in this article: the goal was never to get your exposure to zero. You can't, and trying anyway tends to create more stress than it resolves, which rather defeats the point. The goal is to lower your everyday baseline enough that your liver and your gut, properly supported, can actually keep up with the rest.

One thing worth saying plainly: if you're pregnant, trying to conceive, breastfeeding, or making decisions for young children, this matters more than usual, and it's worth a real conversation with a professional rather than five tips from an article. Early-life exposure lands on a body that's still being built.

If this made you glance twice at your lunch container or your moisturiser, good, that's exactly the reaction I was hoping for. Curiosity, not alarm. I talk through this with clients more often than people expect, usually alongside the hormone and energy questions they actually booked the appointment for. Drop a comment or send me a message if you'd like help figuring out where to start with your own routine.

Sarah Stanghellini, Naturopath Central & Stanley Wellness

About Me

I'm a French Hong Kong–based naturopath passionate about simple, sustainable health practices that reconnect body and mind. I use lifestyle and nutrition guidance, natural medicine, and everyday rituals to help people feel more balanced, focused, and resilient.