are there forever chemicals in my gym clothes.

Published October 25, 2026·File 21 · Fabric safety · News·17 min read

Texas settled with Lululemon over “forever chemicals” in activewear this week, and the headline travelled a lot further than the document. The twelve-page filing says the State found no PFAS and that the only allegation was two missing signature forms. Here is what PFAS actually are, where they live in a garment, which words on a label predict them, what a test number means — and exactly what we can and cannot say about our own fabric.

You have probably seen the headline by now, or a version of it. Forever chemicals. Settlement. Activewear. Three words that do a lot of work next to each other, and by the time they have been shared twice they have become my leggings are poisoning me. The one question people typed into search this week, over and over, was some form of is it safe to keep wearing this. That is a fair question. It also has a better answer than the headline gave it, and the answer starts with reading the thing the headline was about.

So we read it. The agreement is public, it is twelve pages, and it says something quite different from what the coverage implied. Then we went to the research that actually measures PFAS in clothing, because the useful question is not whether one brand got a stern letter. It is which garments carry these chemicals, how you would know before buying, and whether sweating in one changes anything. Those questions have real answers with real numbers. This file is those.

What did Texas actually find?

Start with the document, because everything else in the coverage is a paraphrase of it. The State of Texas opened the matter with a Civil Investigative Demand dated March 26, 2026, announced publicly on April 13. The stated purpose was to find out whether the company had misled customers about “the safety, quality, and health impacts of its products,” and specifically whether its activewear contained PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, the family of several thousand carbon-fluorine compounds the press calls forever chemicals because the carbon-fluorine bond does not break down in the environment on any human timescale. The company’s answer at the time, on the record, was that it “does not use PFAS in its products,” that it “phased out the substance in FY23, which had been used in durable water-repellent products, a small percentage of our assortment” [Fox 7 Austin, April 13, 2026]. Hold that sentence. Durable water-repellent products. It is the whole story and we will come back to it.

Seven months later the two sides filed an Assurance of Voluntary Compliance in Collin County district court — a legally binding settlement under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, signed October 16 and filed October 19, 2026 [the AVC, full text]. Here is what the document itself says, paragraph by paragraph, because this is the part the headline left out:

• The allegation [¶24]: that the company “failed to collect and maintain signed RSL Certificates of Acknowledgement from two Vendors for one edition of the RSL.” An RSL is a restricted substances list — the brand’s own document telling suppliers which chemicals are banned or capped. The acknowledgement is the form a supplier signs saying it has read it. Two suppliers, one edition, two missing signatures. “Those Certificates of Acknowledgement have now been signed.”
• The finding [¶28]: “Following a review of the documents provided in response to its Civil Investigative Demand, the State did not identify PFAS in lululemon products or Materials.”
• The admission [¶17]: none. The agreement “does not constitute an admission by lululemon of any violation of law” and the company “expressly denies any such liability.”
• The money [¶48]: “The Parties shall bear their own costs.” There is no payment, penalty or restitution anywhere in the twelve pages.
• The obligation [¶29–34]: for three years, keep requiring suppliers to prove compliance with the RSL by either third-party lab reports [the designated lab is SGS] or a valid third-party certificate [the document names bluesign and OEKO-TEX Standard 100], check that certificates are current, and re-test when one lapses. The filing records that these were already the company’s processes “since implementing its RSL” [¶27].

Read it cold and the agreement is a compliance-paperwork settlement. The company’s statement afterwards said as much: the deal “reiterates how the company already operates and does not represent a change to its products or practices” [NBC 5 DFW, October 22, 2026]. The Attorney General’s press release framed the same twelve pages as protecting Texans “from harmful chemicals in activewear” and noted the office is “actively looking into” Hanes and Fruit of the Loom over children’s clothing [Texas OAG, October 22, 2026]. Both descriptions are of the same document. Only one of them went viral.

One honesty line before moving on, because it cuts both ways. “Did not identify” is a statement about a document review, not a statement that the State tested garments. The State reviewed the lab reports and certificates the company handed over. That is weaker than independent testing and it is also exactly what every regulator in this space does, because a restricted substances list enforced by supplier testing is the mechanism the entire industry runs on. Which raises the question that actually matters to you, standing in front of a rack: how does a chemical you cannot see get into a shirt, and how would anyone know it was there?

Where do PFAS actually live in a garment?

Not in the fiber. This is the single most useful thing to understand, and it is the thing the coverage flattened. A polyester, a nylon, a modal or a cotton is a polymer or a plant fiber with no fluorine in it. PFAS get onto clothing as a finish — a chemical treatment applied to the fabric after it is knitted or woven — and the finish they are used for is repellency. In the textile literature the category is called DWR, durable water repellent: a coating of side-chain fluorinated polymers that makes water, oil and dirt bead and roll off instead of soaking in [Holmquist et al., Environment International 2016]. The same family of chemistry makes the waterproof-breathable membranes in rain shells [PTFE is a PFAS]. Lululemon’s own restricted substances list says it plainly: “Historically PFAS has been used in commercial water-, oil-, and stain-repellent agents as well as in breathable membranes that remove moisture, e.g., PTFE” [RSL v11.0, October 2026].

The polymer itself is a big, inert molecule. What leaches is smaller: residual non-polymer PFAS left over from manufacturing the coating, processing aids, and the breakdown products the coating sheds as it ages — fluorotelomer alcohols and the perfluoroalkyl acids they turn into [Rodgers et al. 2022]. That is why a brand can say “we do not add PFAS” and a lab can still find trace fluorine: a repellent finish bought from a supplier can carry them whether or not anyone intended it, which is the reason the whole system runs on supplier testing rather than on promises.

So the question is there PFAS in my gym clothes has a sharper form: was a repellent finish applied to this garment? For a rain jacket, a hiking pant sold as water-resistant, a stain-proof school uniform, a leak-proof period garment — often yes. For a knit training tank whose entire job is to absorb sweat and move it outward, the finish does the opposite job to the one the garment is sold for. Wicking finishes are hydrophilic, water-loving; a DWR is hydrophobic, water-refusing. A manufacturer putting a repellent on a sweat-wicking base layer would be fighting their own fabric. It is not impossible, and it is why you check. It is also why the research keeps finding the same pattern.

Which words on a label actually predict it?

This has been tested properly, and the answer is cleaner than you would expect from a class of several thousand chemicals that no label is required to disclose.

The largest peer-reviewed study of the question bought 93 products — clothing, bedding, furnishings — sorted them by the words on their labels, and screened every one for total fluorine, then ran targeted analysis for 36 named PFAS on the 61 that warranted it [Rodgers, Swartz, Occhialini, Bassignani, McCurdy & Schaider, Environmental Science & Technology 2022, 56[10]:6294]. Fluorine above the detection limit turned up in 54 of 93 products, 58 percent. But the split by label is the finding. Among products marketed with a water- or stain-resistance claim, fluorine was detected in 59 to 77 percent depending on the sub-group. Among products without such a claim, 32 percent — and when fluorine was found there, it was almost always low, six of seven detections under 50 ppm. Then the targeted analysis: named PFAS were detected only in products labelled water- or stain-resistant. Zero of the ten products without those claims had a single detection. In the authors’ words: “targeted PFAS were detected only in products labeled as water- and/or stain-resistant.”

Two more findings from the same paper are the ones to carry into a shop. First, the word that predicts best is “stain-resistant.” Products with that claim had fluorine detected 76 percent of the time, against 63 percent for “water-resistant” and 32 percent for neither — the authors note that water resistance can be achieved with a physical barrier like a polyurethane layer, while stain resistance is harder to get without fluorine. Second, and this one stings: “green” and “non-toxic” assurances made no measurable difference. Water-resistant products that also carried eco language or a certification had PFAS detection rates and concentrations similar to water-resistant products without them, and three of the five highest PFAS concentrations in the whole study were in products with green assurances. A leaf on the hangtag is not a fluorine test.

An advocacy report from the same year, not peer-reviewed but with its methods stated, found the same shape in a different basket: of 60 products from 10 major retailers, 47 were marketed as stain- or water-resistant and 72 percent of those contained PFAS; all 13 products without those claims were PFAS-free [Toxic-Free Future, January 2022]. And a third study, this one of 72 children’s products marketed as stain-resistant, mostly school uniforms, found PFAS in every single one, median 117 ng/g, with the kicker that uniforms made of 100 percent cotton carried higher PFAS than synthetic blends [Xia et al., Environmental Science & Technology 2022, 56[19]:13845]. Read that again if your instinct was that synthetic was the problem. The fiber is not the tell. The finish is. A cotton shirt sprayed to shed ketchup carries more fluorine than a polyester one left alone.

Does sweating in it get the chemical into you?

This is the question underneath the question, and the honest answer is: the mechanism is real, the magnitude for a sweaty training session is not yet measured in people, and the research that exists points at treated garments, not plain ones. Three studies carry the argument.

The first asked whether PFAS cross skin at all, which for years was assumed to be negligible because these molecules carry a charge. Researchers dosed 17 PFAS onto lab-grown three-dimensional human skin equivalents and measured what came through over 24 to 36 hours. It was not negligible. The shortest-chain compounds crossed most readily — 58.9 percent of a five-carbon acid [PFPeA] and 48.7 percent of a four-carbon sulfonate [PFBS] were absorbed — and absorption fell as the carbon chain got longer [Ragnarsdóttir, Abou-Elwafa Abdallah & Harrad, Environment International 2024, 188:108772]. Two things to say in the same breath: the dose was dissolved in methanol and applied directly, which is not a shirt, and a skin model is not a person. What the study established is that the door is open. It did not measure how much walks through it from a garment.

The second study gets closer to the garment and is the source of the number you may have seen quoted. Researchers measured 28 PFAS in household textiles and children’s clothing and found them in 87.9 percent of samples, with durable-water-repellent garments carrying roughly three times the PFAS of conventional items — the finish again. They then modelled dermal uptake with and without sweat and found simulated sweat raised predicted absorption by up to 3,252-fold compared with dry contact [Li et al., Science of the Total Environment 2025, 1000:180426]. That is a modelling result on children’s textiles, not a measurement of a lifter’s blood, and “up to” is doing real work in that sentence. But the direction is not in doubt. Sweat is water, and PFAS that are water-mobile move in it. A damp garment against warm skin is a better transfer medium than a dry one.

The third puts a number on dose from an everyday garment. In the school-uniform study, the estimated median exposure from wearing a stain-resistant uniform was 1.03 nanograms of PFAS per kilogram of body weight per day through the skin [Xia et al. 2022]. Small in absolute terms, chronic in pattern, and — this is the point — entirely a function of the garment having been treated. The exposure estimate for an untreated shirt is not small. It is nothing, because there is nothing on it to transfer.

And the stakes, stated without inflation. The National Academies’ 2022 clinical guidance, the most careful review of the human evidence available, found sufficient evidence of association between PFAS exposure and decreased antibody response in adults and children, dyslipidemia [abnormally high cholesterol], decreased infant and fetal growth, and kidney cancer in adults; and limited or suggestive evidence for breast cancer, liver-enzyme changes, pregnancy-induced hypertension, testicular cancer, thyroid disease and ulcerative colitis [NASEM, Guidance on PFAS Exposure, Testing, and Clinical Follow-Up, July 28, 2022]. Those findings are about total exposure, of which drinking water and food are the dominant routes for most people. Clothing is a contributor when the clothing is treated. Nobody has shown it to be one when it is not.

What does the number on a test report mean?

If a brand answers your question with a number, you should know what you are looking at, because there are three different numbers and they do not mean the same thing.

Total fluorine is the screen. A lab burns a sample and measures all the fluorine in it, organic and inorganic, in parts per million — milligrams of fluorine per kilogram of fabric, so 100 ppm is 0.01 percent by weight. It is fast, cheap and catches the polymer coating itself, which the other methods miss. It cannot tell you which PFAS are present, and in the 93-product study the named, extractable PFAS never accounted for more than 0.1 percent of the total fluorine measured — the rest is the inert coating [Rodgers et al. 2022]. Total organic fluorine is the same screen with the mineral fluorine subtracted; it is the number most regulations are written in. Targeted PFAS analysis looks for specific named compounds in parts per billion — a thousand times finer — and it is what the per-substance limits refer to. A report that says “PFAS not detected” without saying which method, which compounds and what limit is not telling you very much.

Here is where the published thresholds sit right now, because they moved this month and they move again in fourteen months:

Rows read from the statute summaries, the certifier’s published limits, the company’s own list and the EU regulation. Reference numbers, not our test results.

Notice what the ladder is converging on. Fifty parts per million of total organic fluorine is becoming the working definition of “no repellent finish” across California, the certifier and the brand in question — low enough to catch any intentional treatment, high enough to allow for the trace contamination that recycled polyester and factory cross-contact can introduce. Also notice what a certificate is. OEKO-TEX says in its own words that its label “does NOT certify the product as ‘PFAS-free’” [Hohenstein, OEKO-TEX PFAS requirements]. It certifies under a cap. That is a meaningful thing, and it is a different thing from zero, and anyone selling you a shirt should be able to tell the two apart.

Can you wash it out?

No, and the reason is worth knowing because it also tells you what washing does do. Researchers coated polyester and polyamide fabrics with both the older long-chain [C8] and the newer short-chain [C6] fluorinated repellents, then aged them, washed them and tumble-dried them and measured what came off. Aging increased the concentration of extractable perfluoroalkyl acids — the coating breaks down into the mobile forms over time. Washing removed part of them, into the wash water. And tumble drying did nothing to the concentrations either way [van der Veen et al., Environmental Science & Technology 2022, 56[9]:5886]. A separate outdoor-weathering study left treated fabric on a Sydney rooftop for six months and found it shed both fluorinated microfibers and newly formed small PFAS throughout, losing its water repellency as it went [Schellenberger et al., Environmental Science & Technology 2022, 56[6]:3471]. The children’s-textile study added one more twist: simulated laundering increased the detection of PFOA in some items, because washing converts precursors into the acid form the lab is looking for [Li et al. 2025].

So the picture of a treated garment over its life is this: the coating degrades, the degradation products are the mobile ones, washing moves a portion of them from your shirt into the water supply, and the garment keeps generating more until the finish is gone. You are not cleaning it out. You are metering it out. Which is the strongest argument there is for the simplest rule in this file: do not buy the finish you do not need. The one place a repellent finish earns its keep — a shell you wear in actual rain — is the one place to make a deliberate choice, and fluorine-free repellents based on silicones or hydrocarbon waxes now exist for exactly that job, at the cost of oil repellency [Holmquist et al. 2016].

The 60-second label read

Everything above is argument. This is the part you can run on anything in your drawer tonight, or on a product page before you pay.

Where our own garments stand

Same rule as every file: what is confirmed gets published, what is not gets said out loud as not. On this topic that discipline matters more than usual, because “PFAS-free” is exactly the kind of claim a brand is tempted to make the week a competitor is in the news, and it is exactly the kind of claim the research says you should not accept without a number.

Here is what we can say, because we checked it tonight. None of our nineteen live product pages markets a garment as water-resistant, water-repellent, stain-resistant or stainproof. We do not sell a rain shell, a treated pant or anything with a durable water repellent, which is the category every study above found the chemicals in. Our COMF+ fabric is published on its pages as 70% modal rayon, 30% recycled polyester, a plain knit whose job is to move sweat, not refuse it.

Here is what we cannot say, and will not. We have not had our fabrics tested for total fluorine, and we hold no OEKO-TEX or bluesign certificate. So we are not going to write “PFAS-free” on anything, because by the standard this file has just spent two thousand words setting out, that phrase without a test report is marketing. The research gives us good reason to expect an untreated knit to come back clean — zero of ten unclaimed products in the Rodgers study, all thirteen in the Toxic-Free Future basket. Expecting is not measuring. So this is owed rather than delivered: a total fluorine result per fabric, by a named method, published with the number on it. It is on the list next to the measured armhole file.

Our own status, read off our own pages tonight. A statement of what is marketed and what has been tested, not a test result.

Quick answers

Did Texas find PFAS in Lululemon clothing?

No. The settlement filed October 19, 2026 states that “the State did not identify PFAS in lululemon products or Materials” after reviewing the lab reports and certificates the company provided. The State’s only allegation was that signed acknowledgement forms for the company’s restricted substances list were missing from two vendors for one edition; they have since been signed. There is no admission of wrongdoing and no payment, and the three-year agreement requires the company to keep requiring supplier lab testing or certification, which the filing records it already did.

Are there forever chemicals in gym clothes?

Only where a repellent finish has been applied. PFAS are put on textiles as durable water repellent coatings for water, oil and stain resistance, and in waterproof membranes. In the largest peer-reviewed label study, named PFAS were found only in products marketed as water- or stain-resistant and in none of the products without such claims. A plain training tank or tee sold without a repellent claim is not the category the research found them in; a rain shell or a stain-proofed pant is.

How can I tell if my leggings have PFAS?

Look for the words water-resistant, water-repellent, stain-resistant, stainproof or DWR on the product page, hangtag or care label. “Stain-resistant” was the strongest predictor in the research, with fluorine detected in 76 percent of such products against 32 percent of products with no repellent claim, and named PFAS in none of the latter. “Moisture-wicking” and “quick-dry” are different chemistry and are not warning signs. “Eco” or “non-toxic” language made no measurable difference.

Does sweating make PFAS absorb through skin?

The mechanism is real and the magnitude for activewear is not yet measured in people. Lab-grown human skin absorbed up to 58.9 percent of a short-chain PFAS applied directly over 24 to 36 hours, and a 2025 study of children’s textiles modelled that sweat could raise absorption by up to 3,252-fold versus dry contact. Both findings concern PFAS that are present on a treated garment. An untreated garment has nothing to transfer, which is why the label read matters more than the fiber.

Does OEKO-TEX certification mean PFAS-free?

No, and the certifier says so. OEKO-TEX Standard 100 bans intentionally added PFAS and caps total fluorine at 100 mg/kg [reducing to 50 in 2026], but states that it “does NOT certify the product as PFAS-free.” It is a cap, which is useful, not a zero. The same 50 ppm total organic fluorine line now appears in California’s textile law from January 1, 2027 and in Lululemon’s own restricted substances list.

Keep reading

• why did this fade so fast. — File 03: what the wash actually does to a fiber, which is the other half of tonight’s washing section
• why does this still smell after i washed it. — File 15: the chemistry of sweat in a knit, and the finishes that do and do not help
• what does gsm actually mean. — the other number on a spec sheet that nobody explains, explained

References

Educational only. Regulatory thresholds and study results are quoted from the cited documents and are not a test of any garment in your hands, ours included. Legal statements are quoted from the public filing; neither party has been found to have violated any law.

— the Scared But Alive fit desk