The Ugly Side of Pretty

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The Ugly Side of Pretty

 

By Rebecca Ephraim, Dragonfly Media. Posted April 6, 2005.

 

 

Emerging science suggests that untold numbers of cosmetics and personal care

ingredients may be silently and insidiously promoting cancer, ravaging

women's reproductive functions and causing birth defects. Story Tools

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"I don't pay much attention to the ingredient lists, I just know what works

for me," said Shelley Carpenter, when asked what she looks for in her

personal care products. Thinking a little harder, she adds, "I'm allergic to

most perfumes, so I stay away from smelly stuff. But I couldn't pin it

down." This begs the question, "Who can?" After all, how many of us have the

time or inclination to scour the ingredient lists of our moisturizer,

deodorant, body lotion and any of the other products we slather on daily?

 

Carpenter, 45, bases her choices of personal body care products primarily on

how her skin immediately reacts to them, and second to that, their

functionality. Her skin, beautifully clear and alabaster, erupts into a red,

scaly rash at the slightest provocation and she's aware from years of trial

and error that certain products set this in motion.

 

But beyond skin eruptions and rashes, emerging science suggests that untold

numbers of cosmetics and personal care ingredients may be silently and

insidiously promoting cancer, ravaging women's reproductive functions and

causing birth defects. Known by hundreds of long, intimidating chemical

names, these ingredients are in the products we shower and bathe with, rub,

spray and dab on our bodies, unconsciously, day-in-and-day-out.

 

It's the day-in-and-day-out part that's of most concern, since these toxic

ingredients leak their poisons through our porous skin and into our bodies

bit-by-bit. "There's not one smoking gun that we can point to and say 'it's

that personal care product, that deodorant, that nail polish that is going

to give you cancer," said Jeanne Rizzo, the executive director of the San

Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund. "We can say the cumulative exposure --

the aggregate exposure that we all have to a myriad of personal care

products containing carcinogens, mutagens and reproductive toxins, has not

been assessed."

 

Categorically, the giant, mainstream personal care products companies

continue to use known or suspected toxic ingredients in their product

formulas. There are literally thousands of substances that have been used

for decades without the slightest hint to consumers that they may be doing

something more than making us squeaky clean and smell good. As activist

Charlotte Brody points out, "Neither cosmetic products nor cosmetic

ingredients are reviewed or approved by the Food and Drug Administration

before they are sold to the public. And the FDA cannot require companies to

do safety testing of their cosmetic products before marketing."

 

Hence, chemicals such as acrylamide (in foundation, face lotion and hand

cream) linked to mammary tumors in lab research; formaldehyde (found in nail

polish and blush) classified as a probable human carcinogen by the

Environmental Protection Agency; and dibutyl phthalate (an industrial

chemical commonly found in perfume and hair spray) known to damage the

liver, kidney and reproductive systems, disrupt hormonal processes and

increase breast cancer risk, are widely used in beauty products.

 

So should Shelley Carpenter be aware of this? She's certainly no slouch.

She's a clinical hospital pharmacist advising doctors on the complex nuances

of drug therapies; she's also working on her doctorate in pharmacy while

being a mom and wife. Point is, like most of us, she's over-extended and

assumes -- like most of us, that whatever personal care products we casually

grab off the store shelf must be OK or, well, they wouldn't be sold. In

other words, we think, "There's somebody watching out for us, probably some

government agency."

 

"The public, bless our little democratic good government hearts, believes

that there is some federal agency that makes sure that dangerous chemicals

aren't put into the products we put all over ourselves. Sadly, it's just not

true," quips Brody, who's executive director of Commonweal. It, along with

Rizzo's Breast Cancer Fund and dozens of other social profit groups, are

waging the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. They're banging the drum to rouse

consumers from our slumber of ignorance to realize the dangers lurking in

personal care products and the failure -- or refusal -- of any power to

change it.

 

The Innocents and the Knowing

 

If you believe that buying "natural" cosmetics and personal care products

(those brands usually found in natural health stores and the like)

guarantees toxin-free ingredients, you are wrong. The reasons for this are

dicey with dollops of gray shading. It comes down to a spectrum that runs

from 1) companies that know better but willfully use toxic ingredients to 2)

well-intending natural products companies that heretofore operated out of

ignorance.

 

But to understand this, we need to go to Europe for some perspective. The

European Union (EU), with its 25 member countries, is taking a more

enlightened (or a less Draconian) approach to protecting its 450 million

people from toxins in personal care products. As of this March, an EU

"Cosmetics Directive," will require companies doing business in Europe to

eliminate chemicals in personal care products known or strongly suspected of

causing "harm to human health." Although there are thousands of questionable

chemicals, the directive is targeting about 450, which is huge compared to

the nine chemicals that the FDA has banned or restricted in personal care

products.

 

The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has seized upon the EU's Cosmetic Directive

and is urging consumers to sign a petition that asks U.S. companies to

commit to meeting the same standards as their European counterparts and then

beyond. So far, some 50 companies have signed the campaign's compact -- all

of them are natural products companies. Not one single, large, mainstream

company has stepped forward, according to Janet Nudelman, coordinator of the

Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. "We've had dozens of conversations with these

companies and they are absolutely unwilling to admit there's a single

chemical that represents harm or could be harmful to consumers in their

products," Nudelman said.

 

Problem is, they don't have to. Major loopholes in federal law allow the $35

billion cosmetics industry to, basically, police itself, allowing unlimited

amounts of chemicals into personal care products with no required testing,

no monitoring of health effects and inadequate labeling requirements.

 

"The U.S. government, in relation to the FDA, has not been on the side of

consumers and has not been on the side of public health," Nudelman said. "We

certainly see that when we see industry representatives serving on

government panels that are looking to the very issue that they are supposed

to be regulating -- and that is consumer safety. Is the fox guarding the hen

house? Yeah, absolutely in the U.S. without question."

 

However, consumers increasingly have a safe option in those "natural

products" companies that have signed the Safe Cosmetics compact pledging to

eliminate any questionable chemicals in the personal care products they

sell. "The natural products companies may not be all pure and 100 percent

where it is we want them to be, but the important thing is that they want to

be there, and they're committed to getting there," Nudelman said. "We're

talking about literally a massive reformulation on the part of many of these

companies in order to meet the core components [of the compact]."

 

California-based Avalon Natural Products, with three different brands,

including Avalon Organics, is one of those companies, reformulating more

than 100 skin care products to eliminate questionable ingredients. For a

casual observer, it's difficult to fathom why a "natural product" would even

have this problem since chemicals like parabens aren't "natural" in the

first place -- yet are pervasive in natural products.

 

Avalon brand manager Tim Schaeffer acknowledged the paradox, which stems

from the complexity of preserving natural ingredients in packaged form.

Parabens are used as preservatives to inhibit bacteria, yeast and mold

growth.

 

"It's a big challenge to keep natural products from literally rotting. You

buy them off a shelf in a store, where they were probably sitting for a

month and before that in a warehouse for another month. Then you bring them

home and put them in a warm, moist environment where they'll sit for six

months or longer ... some things like a deodorant or cream you're putting

your fingers in or rubbing in your armpit on a daily basis. That's a pretty

tough environment to resist rotting. So preservation for products such as

ours that have a lot of organic oils and herbs, is absolutely necessary."

 

Additionally, parabens (and thousands of other questionable ingredients),

have always been legal to use in the U.S. and Canada, and only until

recently, when studies have drawn correlations between their use and breast

cancer, has concern been raised. Up to this time, many -- possibly most --

makers of natural personal care products were not aware of the hazards of

these ingredients. Signers of the compact have scrambled to find effective

natural alternatives.

 

Here's How to Check for Toxins in Your Products

 

In a massive undertaking, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) analyzed the

health and safety reviews of 10,000 ingredients in personal care products.

The EWG discovered that there is scant research available to document the

safety or health risks of low-dose repeated exposures to chemical mixtures.

But the absence of data should never be mistaken for proof of safety. The

EWG points out that the more we study low-dose exposures, the more we

understand that they can cause adverse effects ranging from the subtle and

reversible, to effects that are more serious and permanent.

 

 

 

 

 

Based on that, the EWG has developed Skin Deep, a sophisticated online

rating system that ranks brand-name products on their potential health risks

and the absence of basic safety evaluations. To try out its usefulness, we

ran a list of the personal care products that Shelley Carpenter uses (see

chart). Six of the approximately 10 products she applies daily were

recognized and scored. Among those was one product that may pose cancer

risks and three products with ingredients that may contain impurities linked

to breast cancer; another two, called "penetration enhancers," increase

exposure to other products that are carcinogenic, six of the products

contain ingredients that are unstudied or lack sufficient safety data and,

despite Carpenter's efforts to avoid them, one product contains ingredients

that are allergens. On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being of the highest

health concern, Carpenter's score was a 6.7. What's yours?

 

Janet Nudelman, of the Safe Cosmetics Campaign, says she uses Skin Deep

regularly to look up ingredients in personal care products to get a safety

reading -- and make a purchase decision based on the results. "Consumers

have real power they are not exercising," she said. "We need to let cosmetic

companies know we're going to not buy their products unless they make a

strong unwavering commitment to safety."

 

Sign the consumer petition to encourage companies to join the compact for

Safe Cosmetics:

 

www.safecosmetics.org

 

Purchase from the list of companies that have committed to safe products:

 

www.safecosmetics.org/companies/signers.cfm

 

Dragonfly Media health editor Rebecca Ephraim has become an avid label

reader of personal care products and devotee of "Skin Deep."

 

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re: The Other Side of Pretty (article by Rebecca Ephraim)

Posted by: Robert on Apr 6, 2005 6:20 AM

 

This is a useful article about a huge problem which the public is only

beginning to be aware of. There are ingredients in cosmetics that have been

linked to cancer and other serious diseases that are not required by law to

be listed on containers, and so they are not. Men are affected by this as

well as women. They,too, use protective sun-tanning cremes and oils,

colognes, and deodorants. Presently, consumers do not have adequate

information about dangerous ingedients or about more healthy alternatives to

protect themselves from serious illness, perhaps even death. -Rob M., N.J.

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

To learn more about how the cosmetics industry "self regulates"...

Posted by: smadams on Apr 6, 2005 6:43 AM

 

To learn just how the U.S. cosmetics industry "self regulates", see the

December 27, 2004 edition of The Nation, "New Power for 'Old Europe'".

Cosmetics by definition includes some baby products, such as Desitin and

other diaper rash ointments!

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

It's Been a Bit Obvious

Posted by: nakis on Apr 6, 2005 9:06 AM

 

Why hasn't anyone linked the incidences of cancer in women to cosmetics?

Within the past several years I have known several women to have had there

uterus's removed. Why? It's always been that way? Nearly every day almost

all women put on some sort of makeup, hair spray, body (de)orderant,

feminine products, etc... . None of these were made by elves with woodland

resources. They were made in factories with whatever could be found that

would do the intentional job. And women slather it on their skin. Ask anyone

one if they would rub acetone or titanium dioxide in their skin. They'd say

hell no. But they do it when they get themselves pretty. Thank God for the

Europian Union. They are taking the lead we used to have before the right

derailed us.

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

100% Organic Cosmetics

Posted by: enigmafmc on Apr 6, 2005 9:35 AM

 

There are products available that are 100% certified organic. Miessence, a

new product imported from Australia is the first USDA Certified product in

the United States. While some products say 'natural' it does not mean

organic and there is a difference.

I've used these products and I love them! They feel and smell great.

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

please consider not buying products tested on animals

Posted by: megmsw on Apr 6, 2005 11:07 AM

 

This is a great article. But, I think it is important to note that many of

the personal care products we use everyday are cruelly tested on animals.

Testing products on animals does NOT ensure that they are safe for human

use. Please check to make sure the products you use are not tested on

animals. There are free resource guides available on the internet that show

which companies and products test on animals and which ones are

cruelty-free.

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

» RE: please consider not buying products tested on animals Posted by: kym

 

The Ugly Side of Pretty

Posted by: Emma on Apr 6, 2005 12:09 PM

 

It is with a hopeful heart that I see the truth coming out more and more

about the effect of chemicals in our lives. As one blessed with severe

chemical allergies I have searched and found many chemical free cleaners and

body care items. Chemicals are being linked not only to cancer, but to a

multitude of illnesses. The soap I bathe with is pure enough to eat, it

needs to be because what we put on our skin is absorbed, that is why patches

are effective medical treatments. I understand that warnings may soon be

added to cosmetics stating that they have not been tested for safety. This

is not enough, but it is a beginning. To me it is ironic that we are

concerned about chemical warfare, yet in ingnorance we commit it on

ourselves to satisfy a need implanted in us by clever marketing. Another

irony is that we want to lead the world, at the same time our male babies

are being rendered infertile by chemical hormone disrupters in body care

items used by men and women.

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

Not all chemicals are bad

Posted by: johnsont on Apr 6, 2005 12:53 PM

 

This article is not news to me. As a chemist I read the labels of my

cosmetics and question some of them. But like the woman in the article, I

have multiple chemical sensitivity and my skin will tell me what is bad for

it. For instance, one writer suggested would someone rub titanium dioxide

all over them? I do because I am allergic to all "chemical" sunscreens out

there and titanium dioxide is nothing more than chalkboard chalk! And, I

might add, a very effective UV absorber. I also use zinc oxide. These are

two minerals mined from the earth and not chemicals created in a lab. Many

articles out there are written with a "doomsday" mentality, so it is always

a good thing to do a little research for yourself if you question what you

put on your skin.

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

Take a deep breath

Posted by: paradisi on Apr 6, 2005 6:42 PM

 

and realize that not every chemical is harmful, that everything is made from

them. This piece sounds like mostly an ad for Avalon. There is a move afoot

to force labelling laws changes that require cosmetics to be labeled as

"untested for safety" unless they can shell out the $$$ for testing

themselves. It is more than remotely possible that the true motive here is

to force many small manufacturers out of business. And I have no axe to

grind here; I don't even use cosmetics and I make my own soap.

 

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »]

 

» RE: Take a deep breath Posted by: ill natured

 

 

 

 

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