Chemical Safety Look-Up Databases
Chemical safety databases let you look up a specific ingredient or chemical’s CAS number directly. Some tools, like disease-linkage databases, focus on connecting particular chemicals to specific health conditions, while others rank ingredients by hazard level across categories like reproductive toxicity or skin irritation. It's worth noting that hazard-based rankings differ from true risk assessment, since a chemical can sound alarming on a hazard list while posing little actual risk at the exposure levels found in typical household products. Learn more about this in my free course.
By Dr. Meg Christensen | Physician-founder of Interior Medicine, a non-toxic home resource built on her background in medicine, biochemistry, epidemiology, and clinical research.
Updated May 1, 2026
Collaborative for Health & Environment Toxicant and Disease Database
The Collaborative for Health and Environment has an easy-to-use, searchable database that summarizes links between chemical contaminants and approximately 180 human diseases or conditions.
European Chemicals Agency Database
If you’re unsure of the health effects of any chemical listed in a product’s ingredients, you can search for them in the European Chemicals Agency database by name or CAS number. It’s definitely a little technical, but can be helpful, if that’s your style.
Environmental Working Group (EWG) Guide to Healthy Cleaning
The EWG only uses hazard, not true risk, to assess ingredients, and some say they are not consistent about their precautionary stance, but, for now, they’re the best thing we have for understanding ingredients in cleaning products, and that it’s a great starting point that you can take with a grain of salt. Sometimes scary-sounding chemicals are sometimes surprisingly safe. (Why the difference between hazard vs. risk matters is covered in my free course.)
Will + Perkins Transparency
The Precautionary List database allows you to sort by human health concern (reproductive toxicity, eye irritation, etcetera) and generates a list of chemicals in common interior products and building materials that may contribute to those concerns.
