Activated Charcoal Is Overhyped

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Activated charcoal products have been hot in the natural health and wellness arena for quite a while. Companies make a lot of claims about charcoal’s ability to cleanse your body and detoxify your system. 

If you evaluate what activated charcoal does on a physical and chemical level, the claims make sense. But do they translate to the current uses of charcoal in cosmetic and personal care products?

To understand this, let’s dive into what activated charcoal is, how it works, and how it is applied today, as well as what research exists to back up these applications!

What is activated charcoal and how does it work?

Applications of activated charcoal

Summary / TLDR

What is activated charcoal and how does it work?

Activated charcoal is made by burning wood and then further treating it to remove pretty much everything but the carbon of the wood. This process creates a very porous surface, kind of like a sponge. Additionally, because the end product is just carbon, it has the same chemical properties of carbon, which are that it is negatively charged and looking to take on positively charged compounds to neutralize itself. 

This negative charge is what makes activated charcoal so good at absorbing positively charged volatile compounds, and therefore purifying things like the air, water, or your skin. They carbon molecules of the activated charcoal essentially grab onto toxins by attaching to their positive charge. Then the carbon can be washed or thrown away or repurified in another way. 

This process works similarly in the water and in the air, with the caveat that water filtration is somewhat more effective as it’s easier to direct water to flow through the filter. If you’ve got a charcoal water filter on your in-home water filtration system, all your water is going to go through the filter. It’s more difficult to ensure all your air goes through a filter even if you are using them.

Note to all, this is why it’s important to change your carbon filters if you are using them. Just like a filter on your AC system that catches dust and needs to be changed, your carbon filters become saturated over time and need to be changed. 

There have been a lot of studies showing that activated charcoal is effective at filtering a lot of organic compounds from water, including lead and other definitely undesirable contaminants. There are a lot of materials that can be used to make activated charcoal and, though they all have varying levels of efficacy, they’re all effective at removing toxins from air and water.

Applications of activated charcoal

There are a few applications for activated charcoal with varying levels of scientific evidence. Let’s review them.

Acute poisonings

Activated charcoal has been used frequently in hospital settings to treat acute doses of poisoning. Though it is not an effective treatment for everyone, it has been shown to be useful in treating many cases of acute poisoning. 

The odd thing about using activated charcoal for treatment of poisoning is that it’s kind of difficult to study. As many reviews complain, most studies on this have been conducted with volunteers in a laboratory given doses of poisons (e.g. NSAIDs, sedatives) lower than what would pose significant harm. Which makes sense. You can’t just fatally poison someone and treat them with a theoretical antidote in the name of research. 

There may never be comprehensive evidence of the effectiveness of activated charcoal to treat poisonings, especially with regard to thresholds for various doses of the poisons. What we do have is enough preliminary evidence to suggest it is an effective treatment at least concurrently with other measures or with careful observation to ensure effective treatment. There is enough evidence that it is a widely used technique in medical settings. There is not enough evidence for individuals to use activated charcoal to treat acute poisonings at home, especially with high or unknown levels of various poisons or with children, as there are potential side effects.

Water purification

As discussed above, activated charcoal (a form of activated carbon) is effective at filtering a lot of unwanted compounds out of water. It is a very common way to filter water.

There’s quite a bit of evidence on the efficacy of activated carbon (charcoal) for water filtration, which is why it’s commonly used in water filters. There are several materials that can be used to make activated charcoal, with wood being a very common one, but other materials such as bamboo can be just as if not more effective. One study even found that activated charcoal is capable of filtering up to 100% of fluoride from drinking water, which I know any hippies out there can appreciate. 

Oral hygiene

Activated charcoal has become common in the oral hygiene scene. The thought behind this is that if activated charcoal is good at absorbing harmful compounds, it should be able to do that in our mouths. 

While it’s not wrong to carry this thought and there very well may be benefits to using activated charcoal in your toothpaste, it’s important to understand that there is not any evidence that this is true. If you try to research the use of activated charcoal in dental hygiene, you will find time and again that there is not enough evidence to claim any health benefit from charcoal dental hygiene products or even that they are not as efficient at teeth whitening as other more standard ingredients like fluoride.

Use of charcoal oral hygiene products is unlikely to harm you if you’re generally carrying out strong dental hygiene practices, as you shouldn’t be swallowing these products, but they may not have the benefits you’re hoping for or are promised by influencers and celebrities. I myself love a good charcoal toothpaste here and there (though I hate what they do to my sink), especially since I avoid using fluoride (a topic for another day). But charcoal toothpaste will not do what basic oral hygiene will and you may be sacrificing the benefits of more conventional ingredients.

Cosmetic products, especially facial cleansers

Activated charcoal is used in cosmetic products for the same reasons that it is used in dental products, because of the idea that it will help rid your skin of toxins. The specific idea here is that activated charcoal helps lift dirt and toxins to the surface of the skin to more easily wash off.

This is another area where there isn’t really scientific evidence that activated charcoal is having any real benefits. Some studies show that facial cleansers containing activated charcoal do successfully remove dirt from the pores, but not that it’s more effective than a cleanser without it. 

Additionally, a couple studies of individual products (that don’t seem the highest quality to me) state that activated charcoal cleansers remove toxins from the skin. But again, there’s not enough evidence of this and the evidence that exists is not high quality. 

So activated charcoal facial cleansers and other beauty products may help remove toxins from your skin. But there’s no real evidence of this. Also keep in mind that activated charcoal is going to remove oil to a level that may not be the best for your skin health if used every day. That’s why a lot of times people use this as a once-a-week treatment, with gentler cleansers for everyday use. I personally keep a Toups and Co. charcoal face bar around for occasional use.

Supplementation or natural medicine

It has become increasingly more popular to take activated charcoal supplements (often in pill form) for the purposes of detoxifying your body. I hate to sound like a broken record, but again, there’s no real evidence of a benefit here. There’s studies of the effect of activated charcoal on fish and some other animals, but nothing showing systemic detoxification, as a lot of peddlers out there suggest.

I’m not saying activated charcoal won’t help you remove toxins from your body. It’s certainly possible. What I’m saying is there is no evidence that it will. There’s not even really preliminary evidence of this. There’s evidence of the use of activated charcoal to bind and remove certain poisons, but there’s no evidence that it removes other toxins. It’s a hard thing to test, anyway.

Additionally, you need to be careful when taking activated charcoal as a supplement because it can cause constipation. 

This is a topic for a whole other post, but I’ll briefly mention that there really isn’t any evidence of the benefits of “detoxing your body” anyway. There are so many regimens out there promising to prove your health with no real evidence. Again, doing some types of detoxes could be beneficial, but there’s no proof of this. Certainly some detoxes are harmful. In any case, the best way to promote detoxification is to pursue general holistic health. When your body is healthy and you’re drinking enough water, moving your body, and getting some sun, your body is able to detox very well on its own.

I would not recommend regular use of activated charcoal supplementation. However, I use activated charcoal in a couple key scenarios. I have taken it when I’ve had too much to drink the night before or when I’m struggling with digestive upset or nausea. 

Did your mom ever make you eat burnt (I’m talking BURNT) toast when you had a stomachache growing up? Just me? Well, the burn on your toast is mostly carbon, which as we discussed can absorb things. So an activated charcoal supplement can be effective at calming down the stomach crazies and soaking up the junk in there. But it may not be absorbing teeny tiny toxic compounds like you think it will.

Air filtration and odor removal

Though there is less evidence of the effect of activated charcoal for removing toxins from the air, there is a decent amount of preliminary research to show that it can achieve this on its own and in combination with other filters.  

It would be nice to see more research on this specific application of activated charcoal over time, but what does exist in combination with a basic understanding of the filtration properties of activated charcoal, as well as its effectiveness at filtering water, I’m pretty confident in the capacity for air filtration. One caveat is that, while you can send all water going into a home through a charcoal filter, you can’t really do the same with air. You could put a charcoal filter on an air conditioning unit (not going to provide a link for this because I haven’t done enough research on it) or an electric air purifier, but that’s not going to catch all the air. 

Nonetheless, charcoal air purifier bags may be a great way to filter air and reduce odor in targeted areas. I cover this in more detail in this post if you want to check it out.

Summary / TLDR

Activated charcoal is pretty amazing. Wood and other materials assume an incredibly large surface area through the process of becoming charcoal and have high porosity, making it a pretty perfect material for filtration. 

While there is great research on the effectiveness of activated charcoal for water filtration and limited but solid evidence for air filtration, there is next to no evidence for most applications of activated charcoal in cosmetic and personal care products. Activated charcoal has not been proven to improve oral hygiene, cleanse your face more deeply, or detoxify your body. Though it can act as a great cleanser, one needs to be careful in extending these claims and wary in their use of activated charcoal on a daily basis, especially internally. 

Contrary to popular belief, ingestion of activated charcoal is not without potential complications. Though you are unlikely to hurt yourself consuming an activated charcoal supplement, there is not enough evidence to show it is safe for regular use or for use by children. 

So go buy an activated carbon water filter or bamboo charcoal air purifier bag, but consider the evidence here before spending money on other activated charcoal products or incorporating a daily supplement to your regimen.

I hope you found this information helpful. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to shoot me an email. If you would like to receive more of this content, stay tuned for future posts and join our newsletter. I currently send monthly newsletters with the most recent posts as well as news and updates on all things holistic health and natural wellness.