PFAS and play mats: what independent lab testing found

Over the past year, the same question has landed in my inbox again and again: "Are your mats PFAS free?"

For a long time, my answer was unsatisfying on purpose. I did not hold PFAS test data, so I would not claim it. I could have pointed at the chemistry and said "silicone is not a fluorinated material, so it should be fine". Plenty of brands do exactly that. But "should be fine" is not evidence, and the parents asking me this question want data, not reassurance.

So I went and got it. This is the article I could not write until now.

What are PFAS, and why do parents ask about them?

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a large family of synthetic chemicals built around carbon-fluorine bonds, one of the strongest bonds in organic chemistry. That strength is why they are useful in manufacturing, where they make textiles repel water, oil, and stains, and why they are called "forever chemicals": they break down extremely slowly, in the environment and in the body.

In textiles, PFAS usually arrive as a finish, a stain-repellent or water-repellent treatment applied to the fabric after it is made. A play mat is a textile that babies lie on, chew near, and eat over, so it is a completely reasonable thing to ask about. It is a fair question and it deserves a real answer. If you are weighing up mat materials more broadly, the comparison of foam, PVC and silicone leather mats covers that ground.

Why I would not say "PFAS free"

Here is the uncomfortable truth about the phrase "PFAS free": no honest brand can promise it as an absolute. There are thousands of PFAS compounds. No laboratory tests for all of them, and every test has a detection limit below which nothing can be measured. A test can tell you that a laboratory looked hard, with sensitive methods, and found nothing. It cannot prove a universal negative.

Even OEKO-TEX, whose Standard 100 is one of the strictest textile safety certifications there is, says plainly that certification means the product has been tested for listed substances. It is not a "PFAS-free" certification, and OEKO-TEX itself says so.

So the claim I make is narrower, and I think stronger for it: the fabric has been independently tested for total fluorine and more than 30 individual PFAS compounds, none detected in the most recent round. Here is what that testing looked like.

How the fabric was tested

The finished coated fabric that the mats are made from was tested in September 2025 by an independent laboratory, as part of the testing behind its OEKO-TEX Standard 100, Class 1 certification. Class 1 is the strictest class, the one for products intended for babies and toddlers. The fabric is sampled as finished material, not raw silicone, and the certification body chooses the sample colourway itself, a different one each year. The same testing ran in the 2024 round, so I hold two years of reports, and the numbers below come from both.

I want to be transparent about how these results reached me, because the story is slightly unglamorous. I did not commission a special test. After several customers asked about PFAS, I went back to the manufacturer and asked for the full laboratory reports behind the certificate, not just the certificate itself. The answer had been sitting in those reports all along.

Two separate lines of evidence came out of that testing.

1. Total fluorine: below the reporting limit

The laboratory measured total fluorine in the fabric using combustion ion chromatography. This is a screening method that captures fluorine from any fluorinated compound, organic or not. That makes it broader than the "total organic fluorine" (TOF) testing that careful low-tox reviewers ask brands for: a result below the reporting limit answers the TOF question with margin to spare. If a PFAS finish had been applied to the fabric, it would show up here as elevated fluorine, whatever the specific compound.

The 2025 result: below the 20 mg/kg reporting limit. OEKO-TEX has applied a total fluorine limit to certified products since 1 January 2024, and the pass limit is 100 mg/kg. So the fabric did not scrape past the threshold. Nothing was detected at all, at a reporting limit set at one fifth of the allowed level.

The 2024 round is worth showing alongside it, because that is the year the screen registered something, and I would rather show you the number than round it away. Total fluorine in 2024 measured 38 mg/kg, about a third of the allowed level. Total fluorine counts fluorine from any source, organic or inorganic, and on its own it cannot say what the fluorine is. That is exactly why the individual compound panel exists: in the same 2024 report, that panel found no PFAS compound at all.

2. An individual PFAS panel: more than 30 compounds, all below detection

Alongside the fluorine screen, the laboratory ran a panel of more than 30 individual PFAS compounds. It included the names you may recognise from the news, PFOA and PFOS, along with PFBA, PFHxA, PFNA, the C9-C14 PFCA family, fluorotelomer alcohols, and the PFOS-related group.

Every single compound came back below the detection limit, in the 2024 round and again in the 2025 round.

Not one individual PFAS compound, in two years of testing.

Why this result makes sense

A test result is more convincing when the material explains it. This fabric has three components: a silicone coating, a polyester base cloth, and pigments mixed into the silicone. That is the whole recipe. The manufacturer confirmed in writing this August that it applies no other finishes, water-repellents, or treatments.

That matters because PFAS in textiles almost always come from added finishes, applied to make a fabric do something it cannot do on its own. Silicone does not need the help. The water resistance and stain resistance of the mats come from the silicone coating itself, which is fluorine-free chemistry: silicon and oxygen, not carbon and fluorine. There is simply nothing in the construction that would call for a fluorochemical treatment.

If you want the deeper dive into what the material is and how it behaves, the material story page covers it, and the sister article on formamide and EVA foam play mats explains why I keep coming back to the same principle: read the test data, not the adjectives.

What these results do and do not mean

I promised data over reassurance, so let me draw the boundary lines honestly.

What the results mean:

• In the most recent testing round (2025), the finished coated fabric, the actual material of a Roam or any of the other mats, was screened for total fluorine by an independent laboratory, and nothing was detected, at a reporting limit five times stricter than the OEKO-TEX pass limit.
• More than 30 individual PFAS compounds were tested for, in both 2024 and 2025, and every one was below detection in both years.
• The 2024 fluorine screen did register 38 mg/kg, about a third of the allowed level, with a completely clean compound panel in the same report. That number is part of the record, so it is part of this article.

What they do not mean:

• They do not make "PFAS free" an absolute, provable fact. No test of any product can do that, for any brand, and I would rather tell you so than borrow certainty I do not have.
• The OEKO-TEX Standard 100, Class 1 certificate is not itself a PFAS-free certification, and I will not present it as one. The certificate tells you the fabric passed the standard's limits. The laboratory report behind it tells you what was actually measured, which is why I went after the report.

That distinction, certificate versus underlying data, is one I would encourage you to push every brand on, including this one.

A certificate is a summary. The lab report is the evidence.

The honest answer, finally

So when the next email arrives asking "are your mats PFAS free?", my answer has changed shape. It is no longer "I don't hold test data, so I won't claim it". It is: in the most recent testing round, the fabric was independently tested for total fluorine and more than 30 individual PFAS compounds, none detected. And across the two years of reports I hold, not one individual PFAS compound has ever been detected.

That answer is a measurement, not a slogan. For the surface your baby eats over and naps on, it is the answer I always wanted to be able to give.

If you want to understand the material behind these numbers, read the material story. It is the long version of everything above.

Sources: the full 2024 and 2025 analysis reports behind the fabric's OEKO-TEX Standard 100, Class 1 certification, issued by an independent laboratory and held on file; OEKO-TEX Standard 100 limit values, including the total fluorine limit applied since 1 January 2024 (oeko-tex.com); the manufacturer's written composition confirmation, August 2026.

If you came here checking the mat in your basket: every Studio Huske mat is made from the same tested silicone leather fabric. The material story is the place to read what that fabric is.