Forever Chemicals in Tampons? | P&G PFAS

Lead with the Victims

For years, Rene Strano, a citizen of Staten Island, New York, did what millions of consumers do every day: she tried to make careful, informed choices for her health. Walking the aisles of stores like CVS, Target, and Walgreens, she sought out personal care products that were free of what she considered unnecessary ingredients.

When she purchased Tampax brand tampons, the packaging seemed to promise exactly that. She read and relied on the prominent statement that the products were “free of dyes”. This was a conscious choice, a decision to pay for a product she believed was cleaner and more aligned with her values, a choice made repeatedly in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024. But the trust placed in that simple phrase would eventually become the foundation of a legal challenge, revealing a story about the widening gap between corporate marketing and consumer reality.

The Corporate Playbook: How the Harm Was Done

The Procter & Gamble Company (P&G), a corporate giant in the consumer goods sector, manufactures and sells Tampax tampons under several sub-brands, including Cardboard, Pearl, and Radiant. On the packaging of each of these products, the company makes a clear and appealing claim to a growing market of health-conscious buyers: the tampons are “free of dyes”.

This statement is a direct appeal to shoppers actively seeking to avoid added, unnecessary coloring agents in sensitive feminine hygiene products. The problem, as alleged in a class-action complaint, is that while this statement may be literally true, it is profoundly misleading. The tampons contain titanium dioxide, a synthetically prepared powder used as a white pigment.

The lawsuit argues that this ingredient serves the exact same purpose as a dye: to alter the appearance of the tampon and its components for purely cosmetic reasons. This use of a whitening agent allegedly does nothing to improve the safety or effectiveness of the product. By marketing a product containing a colorant as “free of dyes,” P&G created a belief that its products were simpler or “purer” than they actually were, a belief that came at a direct cost to the consumer.

A Cascade of Consequences: The Real-World Impact

The fallout from this marketing strategy has tangible economic consequences for ordinary people and represents a significant erosion of public trust.

Economic Injustice

The central harm outlined in the complaint is financial. The lawsuit claims that P&G leveraged the misleading “free of dyes” statement to sell more products and, crucially, to sell them at higher prices. Consumers like Rene Strano paid more for Tampax products than they would have if they had known the full story, and more than they would have for similar products that were not presented in a misleading way.

This “premium” price, charged for an attribute the product allegedly doesn’t possess, resulted in additional profits for P&G directly at the expense of its customers.

The lawsuit asserts that these prices are higher than what they would be without the misleading representations, turning a consumer’s desire for healthier products into a corporate profit center.

A System Designed for This: Profit, Deregulation, and Power

(Analysis)

The situation detailed in the Strano v. The Procter & Gamble Company complaint is a predictable outcome of a neoliberal economic system that relentlessly prioritizes shareholder profit above all else. In this framework, the consumer desire for “clean” and “natural” products is not seen as a public health goal to be met, but as a market trend to be capitalized upon.

The corporate playbook is clear: identify a consumer value—in this case, the avoidance of unnecessary additives—and then engineer marketing language that captures that demographic, whether or not the product fully embodies that value. The alleged use of the phrase “free of dyes” while including a whitening pigment is a masterclass in this approach. It relies on a technicality—that titanium dioxide may not be legally classified as a “dye”—to mislead consumers about the functional reality that the product contains an ingredient used for coloration.

This is a hallmark of late-stage capitalism: the commodification of trust. The system does not incentivize transparent, honest communication like one would hope it does. Instead, it incentivizes whatever language maximizes sales and market share. Regulatory bodies are often outpaced and out-resourced by corporate legal and marketing departments, creating an environment where “technically true but functionally misleading” becomes a profitable strategy.

Dodging Accountability: How the Powerful Evade Justice

The legal action taken by Rene Strano is a class action, a critical tool for ordinary people to challenge massive corporations. However, the history of such cases suggests a frustrating pattern of accountability. Often, these lawsuits end in a monetary settlement.

For a company the size of P&G, such a payout is rarely a punishment that inspires systemic change. It is treated as a predictable “cost of doing business”—a line item on a budget, far smaller than the profits gained from the conduct in question.

These settlements typically come with no admission of guilt, allowing the company to maintain its public image while quietly paying to make the problem disappear. No individual executive is held responsible, and the underlying business logic that incentivized the misleading marketing in the first place remains unchanged.

Reclaiming Power: Pathways to Real Change

True change requires moving beyond case-by-case lawsuits. It requires a systemic reimagining of corporate accountability. This could include:

• Strengthening “Truth in Advertising” Laws: Regulations must evolve to focus not on technical loopholes, but on the reasonable perception of the consumer. If an ingredient’s function is to color a product, it should not be in a product advertised as free of colorants.
• Empowering Regulatory Agencies: Federal agencies need the funding and authority to proactively police misleading claims and levy fines that are genuinely punitive, not just a business expense.
• Corporate Governance Reform: Shifting corporate charters to require that companies consider public good and stakeholder health, not just shareholder profit, would change the fundamental calculus that leads to these decisions.

Neoliberal capitalism might shrug off these questions, claiming the market will self-correct. But as we see time and again, corrections come only after harm is done and trust is eroded. If the system were more balanced—if agencies had the resources and mandate to quickly enforce labeling accuracy, if legislative definitions of terms like “dye-free” were crystal clear, if corporate executives could be held personally responsible for misrepresentations—perhaps fewer such lawsuits would be necessary.

Conclusion: A Story of a System, Not an Exception

The complaint against The Procter & Gamble Company is more than a dispute over a single ingredient in a single product. It is a window into a much larger crisis. It reveals an economic system where the pursuit of profit routinely eclipses the right of consumers to make informed decisions about their own bodies. The story of Tampax and titanium dioxide is the story of late-stage capitalism, where even the desire for personal wellness is co-opted and sold back to the public at a premium. The individual actors are merely players taking advantage of a system that is designed, from the ground up, to produce precisely these outcomes.

All factual claims in this article pertaining to the class action lawsuit were derived from the legal document Strano v. The Procter & Gamble Company, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York on April 29, 2024. A copy of which is attached right here: