Is Painting Safe During Pregnancy?

The nesting has begun! I really want to repaint the accent wall in my baby’s future nursery (it’s an ugly brown shade right now). Is painting safe to do at any point in pregnancy? Do I just need to wear a mask? And what about dust from scraping paint?

—Anonymous

This is an extremely common question. Between nesting, the need for a new nursery, the fact that many people move during pregnancy — paint comes up. I will confess, the only time I considered painting a room was during my first pregnancy, when I had some ideas about colors. My husband convinced me that if beige was good enough for the rest of the house, it was good enough for the nursery. We put on some wall stickers. But you might like to paint!

The source of the worry with paint is that we know that consistently sniffing paint (which is unfortunately somewhat common) is associated with birth defects. Of course, the experience of painting a room is very different from paint sniffing abuse, and with almost any environmental exposure, dose really matters.

This (quite old but still relevant) paper contains a lot of what we know about this. It covers a variety of other studies that look at occupational paint exposure. This is data that compares birth outcomes for mothers who work with paint at their job but are not abusing it. There, even with the consistent exposure, there is limited evidence of negative outcomes. If we then extend further to individuals who are engaging in a small amount of wall painting, it is hard to imagine that there would be significant effects.

A small-scale survey by the Teratogen Information Service has a similar set of findings — it compared birth outcomes for a set of women who called its hotline and painted their rooms versus those who did not, and it found no differences in birth outcomes.

Given all of this, there is little reason to be worried about the limited amount of painting you describe. You could wear a mask (generally a good idea when painting) and open a window for better ventilation.

When it comes to paint dust, the only additional caution is that if your house is old, the paint may be leaded. This is worth investigating before you start stripping it. With leaded paint, you would want to be more cautious about your exposure.