The Forever Chemical Cover-Up – What Nike, Lululemon, Adidas and Shein Haven't Told You
- Apr 29
- 5 min read
Written by Jagroop Sahi, Founder & CEO
Founder of KIDDYKIND, a curated marketplace for sustainable baby and kids brands, Jagroop Sahi writes on sustainability, conscious capitalism, and why supporting small businesses is essential to building ethical, future-ready economies.
Ninety-seven percent of children tested have forever chemicals in their blood. Not some children. Not children in industrial areas, or children with unusual exposures. Ninety-seven percent. The brands selling clothing treated with those same chemicals have known about the risks for decades. The lawsuits have started. The investigations are live. And the leggings, the sports kits, the school jackets, they are still on the shelves.
What you're actually buying when you buy "performance" clothing
PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of over 12,000 synthetic chemicals used in clothing to create water resistant, stain proof, and wrinkle free finishes. That waterproof children's jacket. The "performance" leggings. The sports kit with the moisture wicking guarantee. The technology behind many of these products has a name the brands would rather you didn't search for.
They are called forever chemicals because that is precisely what they are. They do not break down in the environment. They do not break down in soil or water. They do not break down in the human body.
Once PFAS enter the body, they stay. They have been found in blood, in breast milk, in umbilical cord blood. They are now present in virtually every person on earth. New research published in 2025 revealed something that should stop every parent in their tracks, when skin sweats, absorption of PFAS increases by up to 3,252 times compared to dry contact.
Read that again. Not two times. Not ten times. Three thousand, two hundred and fifty-two times. That is the category of clothing your child wears during sport, during play, during the hours their body works hardest. That is precisely the clothing the biggest brands in the world have been treating with these chemicals.
A child's body is not a small adult's body
The industry's standard response, when one is offered at all, is that chemical levels fall within acceptable limits. What this framing quietly ignores is that those limits were not designed with children in mind.
Children absorb chemicals through skin at a significantly higher rate than adults. Their immune and endocrine systems are still developing. Disruption at low doses during critical developmental windows can have lasting effects that take years, sometimes decades, to manifest.
The health consequences of PFAS exposure are not theoretical. They are documented. They include certain cancers, thyroid disease, hormone disruption, immune system suppression, elevated cholesterol, reduced birth weight, weakened antibody response to vaccines, and developmental delays. These are not edge cases. The EPA formally regulated PFAS in drinking water for the first time in April 2024, an acknowledgment that the evidence had become impossible to ignore.
And yet, children's clothing has remained one of the least scrutinized categories when it comes to chemical content.
The brands, the lawsuits, and what they'd prefer you didn't know
This is no longer a story about emerging risk. It is a story about documented harm and the legal consequences beginning to follow.
In 2025, Greenpeace purchased 56 garments from Shein across eight countries and tested them independently. Thirty-two percent of products exceeded EU safety limits. Seven items exceeded PFAS limits by up to 3,300 times the legal threshold. One children's dress tested at 260mg/kg of formaldehyde, that’s 3.5 times the European limit. These were not edge cases pulled from obscure product lines. These were items sold on one of the world's most visited retail platforms, many of them marketed to children.
What makes this worse is that Shein had already been investigated for the same thing. In 2022, Greenpeace found near identical results. Shein pledged to improve. Nothing changed.
In February 2026, the Texas Attorney General filed a formal lawsuit against Shein for selling clothing containing toxic chemicals, including items marketed to newborns and pregnant women. The same office launched a formal investigation into Lululemon over PFAS in its activewear, examining the brand's restricted substances lists, testing protocols, and supply chain practices. Lululemon claims to have phased out PFAS in 2023. The investigation is examining whether that claim holds.
Nike, Adidas, Fabletics, and Gymshark are currently under active class action investigation for PFAS in leggings in the United States. These are not fringe legal actions. They are part of a wave of litigation moving through the American court system as the evidence base becomes undeniable.
The direction of travel is clear. The brands knew. The question now being asked in courts is, what did they do about it?
The system was not built to protect your child
It would be reassuring to believe regulation is keeping pace. It is not. The EU has been developing some of the world's most ambitious PFAS restrictions in textiles, but implementation is slow and contested. In the UK, post Brexit chemical safety standards have diverged from the EU framework still being built. In that gap, brands continue to operate. Legal compliance does not equal safety. It is compliant with whatever the current standard happens to be, a standard shaped by decades of industry lobbying.
The production model makes the problem worse. An industry producing between 80 and 150 billion garments per year, with cost as the primary driver, is not one that voluntarily absorbs the expense of cleaning up its chemistry. It waits until it is forced. In the meantime, it markets performance, protection, and durability, language that functions as cover for a chemical application most parents would reject if it were described plainly on the label. There are no mandatory labels. There is no plain disclosure. There is marketing.
97% is not a statistic to scroll past
Ninety seven percent of children tested have PFAS in their blood. That is not a number the industry has responded to with urgency. It has responded with restricted substances lists, voluntary pledges, and PR statements, the same tools it has deployed for years while the evidence mounted.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that PFAS free alternatives not only exist, they work. Independent testing in the UK found that six out of seven children's outdoor coats tested were PFAS free, demonstrating clearly that the technology to build safe, high performing children's clothing is available. The issue has never been capability. It has been a choice.
Brands built from the ground up on the principle that children's clothing should be genuinely safe, not just legally defensible, are operating and growing. They tend to be smaller. Often parent founded. Always more transparent. This is precisely why at KIDDYKIND, every brand we platform is vetted on material safety, supply chain transparency, and production ethics.
Finding PFAS free children's brands should not require a chemistry degree, a Greenpeace report, or a lawsuit to prompt the question.
It should be the default. The forever chemicals have been in plain sight for long enough. And now, finally, so has the accountability.
Read more from Jagroop Sahi
Jagroop Sahi, Founder & CEO
Jagroop Sahi is the founder of KIDDYKIND, a curated marketplace championing sustainable and ethical baby and kids brands. She is a sustainability entrepreneur and contributing journalist writing on conscious capitalism, corporate responsibility, and the role of small business in building future-ready economies. Known for bridging values-driven purpose with commercial reality, she offers practical insights for leaders navigating impact, scale, and consumer trust. Through her work, she challenges businesses to move beyond performative sustainability toward meaningful, measurable change.
