Can powder mineral make-up cause lung cancer?

There are mass quantities of dust particles and fine aerosol particles suspended in the atmosphere (read: air) with or without mineral makeup that you breathe in every moment of every day. My guess is: you’ll be fine.

I’ve never heard or read anything about that.

I’d worry more about hair spray.

It depends mostly on what the particles are, but for the most part, your body’s defenses against such things are adequate to keep you just fine. A good example, lead-based makeups were bad because of lead soaking into the blood via the skin, not from lead particles getting to your lungs. If lungs were an issue, the lead poisoning in the lungs would have been much more obvious.

Plus, almost all cosmetics are extensively tested for just this reason. You’ll be fine.

Maybe if you snort it.

I’ve never heard of that before, so I don’t think that there is enough harm in the particles in the air from mineral make up. I guess it depends on the amounts of minerals in that specific type of make up. And as @faye said, I think that if you’re worried about anything, maybe hairspray from the aerosol cans.

Dr. Oz actually talked about this on one of his shows. They (being I guess him and his colleagues) are worried about the long term affects of breathing in all those particles from mineral makeup. This episode might be in his archives on his site, not sure.

Here is the episode @MoneyMakingMommy is referring to. http://www.doctoroz.com/videos/price-beauty

We breathe in so much crap just living in ordinary society, it probably wont be your makeup that gives you lung cancer if anything does. And you will eventually get lung cancer if nothing else beats it to the punch. We’re all ticking timebombs afterall. No reason to sweat the little things like mineral makeup.

If you breathe in such a sufficient amount as to adversely irritate, stress, and inflame the lung lining, then it can cause cancer. Stressed cells have a higher risk of mutation.

No one thing causes cancer directly. Our DNA gets f-ed up by multiple toxins if it wasn’t already iffy from genetics. Over time, there are more and more mutations that eventually result in cancer (aging only exacerbates this process). In our society we have many environmental stressors that can affect act as mutagens. Make-up in the U.S. has over 10,000 chemicals in it and many of these are carcinogenic – I researched this some time ago and the limits set in Europe are much more stringent whereas in the U.S. any corporation can harm our health and no one’s the wiser because they’ve got such a strong lobby. You can read more here and definitely here.