14 Carat Cadmium

What’s the best way to give your daughter Liver Disease? Serve her a whiskey sour before naptime? Let her teeth on a rusty battery? Nope. All you need to do is let her wear cheap jewelry.

Recent studies have shown that jewelry of the child-friendly sort (meaning no biggie if she breaks it) is frequently laced with between 10% and 90% of Cadmium, a toxic heavy metal that causes liver disease, other cause, and other cause.  When lead was banned in children’s toys, manufacturers needed an alternative cheap metal to keep costs down for parents of accident-prone consumers.  And so they turned to cadmium.

Here’s the problem: cheap jewelry is designed to be cheap. What dodo gives the good stuff to the toddler, anyway? It makes more sense to invest less in something she’s going to break, outgrow, or grow bored of within a matter of weeks. It’s made to be disposable. And cheap jewelry is made out of cheap materials that are cheap because they’re bad--as in highly toxic if you happen to put it in your mouth.

As it turns out, one of the same reasons we don’t give the little ones the good stuff is the same reason we shouldn’t give them the cheap stuff: when they suck on it, chew on it, or otherwise ingest it, bad things happen. And when they’re swallowing or teething on cadmium laced jewelry, chances are strong that they’ll also ingest large amounts of cadmium, which can lead to liver and neuro-developmental problems.