The Ugly Side of Pretty

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/21686/

 

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.

 

" 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.

 

uglypretty

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. "