Every baby deserves the healthiest possible start in life. Green Baby Day shines a light on the harmful chemicals that can be found in everyday products and the action needed to create safer environments for babies and their families.
To mark Green Baby Day 2026, Wen brought together healthcare professionals, researchers and campaigners to explore toxic chemical exposure during pregnancy and early childhood, and why prevention must go beyond individual choices.
Following the event, Green Baby Programme Manager Ivié Itoje reflects on what she learned and why an intersectional approach is essential to protecting babies’ health.
Why Green Baby Day matters
When we began planning our annual Green Baby Day Webinar, I knew I wanted an intersectional lens to underpin the conversation. What I did not yet fully appreciate was how sharply that lens would refract the science, the stories, and ultimately my own thinking about what prevention really means.
The science on endocrine-disrupting chemicals is growing rapidly. We know more than ever about how harmful chemical exposures during pregnancy and early childhood can shape health across the life course. As obstetrician Dr Karen Joash reminded us during the webinar, babies are not simply “small adults”. Their rapidly developing bodies are far more vulnerable to environmental exposures, and chemicals that cross the placenta can influence development at critical stages.
There is a tendency in public discourse to assume that products marketed for babies have been thoroughly tested and regulated with their safety in mind. Yet regulation often lags behind science. Terms such as “natural”, “gentle” or “eco-friendly” are not regulated ‘guarantees of safety’, and they can create a false sense of reassurance.
Why prevention is about more than individual choices
In that gap between perception and reality sits a more uncomfortable truth: we often frame chemical exposure as an unfortunate but equal feature of modern life. Something everyone must simply manage through better choices. These conversations about informed decision-making are important, because information does matter, and as the webinar highlighted, baseline awareness is still not widespread. But information alone is not the full story because information exists within structures.
The webinar left me thinking about one question: what if exposure to harmful chemicals isn’t simply about individual choices, but about the systems that shape the choices available to us?
A person cannot choose what products have been marketed to their community for generations, nor can they control whether the chemicals permitted in those products have been assessed with sufficient rigour. By the time a child is born, countless decisions have already been made on their behalf.
Dr Karen Joash brought this into sharp focus through the story of Ella Adoo-Kissi-Debrah. Ella’s death changed how this country understands air pollution, revealing not just a medical tragedy but a systemic one. As she spoke, I found myself reflecting on how readily we accept unequal environments as ordinary. We map pollution as though it is simply a feature of geography, rather than a product of policy, history, and power.
That same pattern repeats itself in the products we use.
Environmental justice and unequal exposure
When the conversation shifted from air pollution to personal care products, Laura Gillen and Puja Chowdhury presented findings from the Non-Toxic Black Beauty Project. What stayed with me was not only the presence of hazardous chemicals, but the distribution of risk. Products marketed to Black women and girls were found to contain higher levels of chemicals of concern, including formaldehyde-releasing preservatives, phthalates and parabens. In other contexts, skin-lightening products marketed in some Asian communities have been found to contain substances such as mercury. These findings are not incidental. They reflect how markets are shaped by social history.
As Laura put it, safer products should not be a luxury. And Puja added an important dimension: these products are not chosen in a vacuum. They are shaped by centuries of racialised beauty standards, targeted marketing, and structural pressures that influence how people move through the world, often in ways that are not freely chosen but deeply constrained.
After the webinar, I kept returning to a single image: a woman standing in front of a bathroom mirror, smoothing relaxer through her hair while pregnant. Perhaps she was preparing to go to work, or getting ready for a wedding. She may have been doing what generations before her had done because it was familiar, because it was expected, because it made life a little easier in a world that is not always designed with her in mind.
Ultimately she didn’t just deserve products that honoured her trust but a world that she could trust.
Campaigns such as Level Up’s No More Lyes initiative demonstrate that change is possible when communities organise and evidence is made visible. The removal of sodium hydroxide hair relaxers from major retailers was not just a shift in formulation; it was an exposure of how uneven risk has been distributed for decades.
What became clearer to me through the webinar is that intersectionality is not an add-on to environmental health. It is foundational to understanding exposure itself.
What prevention really looks like
Green Baby was founded on the belief that every child deserves the healthiest possible start in life.
But what this webinar made clearer is that prevention cannot begin at the level of individual behaviour alone.
It needs to be embedded in legislation that keeps pace with science rather than lagging behind it. As Jo Frame recognised it also sits in healthcare systems that train professionals to recognise environmental exposure as part of early development. It is reflected in cities designed around health rather than profit, and in products that do not ask some communities to absorb greater risk than others.
Ultimately, what the webinar clarified for me is that prevention cannot be separated from the conditions in which exposure becomes normalised. It is shaped long before individual choices are made, through systems that determine which risks are visible, regulated, or accepted.
For me, that is the enduring message of Green Baby Day. Protecting babies’ health means looking beyond individual choices and addressing the systems that shape exposure in the first place. At Wen, our Green Baby campaign is rooted in the belief that every child deserves the healthiest possible start in life, and that requires action to create safer products, stronger regulation and healthier environments for all families.
Watch the Green Baby Day webinar
Hear from Dr Karen Joash, Laura Gillen, Puja Chowdhury and Jo Frame as they discuss toxic chemicals, environmental justice and why prevention must start before birth. Watch the webinar
Find out more
Learn more about Green Baby and Wen’s work to reduce babies’ exposure to harmful chemicals:
Read #NotOnOurBabies campaign guide
Read make your own baby care and body care products
Ivié Itoje, Green Baby Programme Manager & Climate Sisters Manager
Ivié is passionate about intersectional feminism, sustainability, and holistic health solutions. With a background in law, advocacy, the performing arts, and body image work, she leads the Green Baby Project, promoting non-toxic and accessible baby care solutions for healthier families and a healthier planet.
