The average American adult uses 10 personal care products a day containing 100 or more unique chemicals.
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Just tell me what not to buy. Just tell me which ingredients to avoid.
It’s the most common reaction people have upon hearing my story. “My story” is every woman’s story — and every man’s story, every child’s story, even the ones not yet born. My own tale has to do with being a teenage make-up diva. Each morning was an elaborate ritual involving various skin creams, eight types of face make-up and multiple hair products, topped off with a generous cloud of Aqua Net Extra Super Hold — all applied before leaving the house to catch the school bus.
Twenty years later, thanks to the modern wonder of the Skin Deep report (cosmeticdatabase.com) — a comprehensive safety database of chemicals in cosmetics created by the Environmental Working Group — I was able to investigate my former teen routine and find out what I was exposing myself to on a daily basis: 200 chemicals in all, many of them toxic, just from the personal care products.
Some highlights from my former beauty regimen:
Even if you have never marked an eyelash with mascara, even if you are a Whole Foods shopping, careful consumer of all things “natural,” even if you are a man, this is your story. It’s your story whether you live in New York City or the most remote regions of the Arctic Circle; no matter your age, race or income level. It’s your story and mine because all of us alive on the planet today share something in common that was unshared by countless generations of humans who lived before us: we carry man-made pollutants inside our blood, urine and breast milk.
We absorb these toxicants from the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat and the products we rub on our bodies, so it makes sense they’d also be in us. But it is only recently, with a scientific technique known as biomonitoring, that scientists have been able to measure the actual levels of synthetic industrial chemicals that are getting into people — our so-called chemical “body burden.”
For the past several years, government and independent researchers have studied the blood, urine and breast milk of people in all regions of the world. The studies reveal that every single one of us is contaminated with scores of synthetic chemicals that are known to be toxic.
One recent study conducted by the Environmental Working Group put the problem in troubling perspective. As with previous biomonitoring studies, this one revealed that each person’s blood was contaminated with cosmetic chemicals, flame retardants, stain repellents, pesticides, Teflon components and even PCBs that were banned in the 1970s. But the subjects of this study were unlike the others: these were newborn babies, fresh from the womb.
EWG found an average of 200 industrial chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of babies who had never been in direct contact with industrial society.
This, to some, is a signal of crisis. “Please don’t tell me a pre-polluted baby is just fine,” as columnist Julie Deardorff wrote in the Chicago Tribune.
“Parents know intuitively that babies in the womb are more vulnerable to the effects of industrial chemicals than adults,” points out Jane Houlihan, vice president of research at EWG and lead author of the baby cord-blood study. “This intuition is backed by science that has unfolded primarily over the past two decades.”
Pound for pound, kids absorb more chemicals into their bodies, and their immature systems often don’t detoxify and eliminate chemicals as efficiently as adults. Studies show that even low doses of some chemicals — including ingredients found in every day products such as baby toys and cosmetics — can disrupt hormones, interfere with development and cause disease, particularly if exposures occur in the womb or early childhood.
The science indicates that toxic exposures are contributing to childhood cancer, hormone-related cancers, asthma, learning disabilities and other health problems that have been increasing in recent decades (see Database.HealthandEnvironment.org for more information about the links between chemicals and specific diseases).
The studies show that:
The new science calls into question the old way of thinking about chemical risk and disease — the idea that toxic chemicals have obvious health effects at higher doses, but lower doses are safe. This is the framework regulators use to calculate risk assessments to determine the so-called “tolerable intake levels” of human exposure to toxic chemicals. But such risk assessments are likely to underestimate risk because they typically don’t consider the sometimes surprising impacts of low-dose exposures, interactions between genes and chemicals, effect on fetuses and the enhanced effects of chemical mixtures.
“Our health standards are in the Jurassic period,” says Pete Myers, PhD, chief scientist of Environmental Health Sciences. Myers, along with Theo Colburn and Dianne Dumanoski, co-authored the groundbreaking 1996 book Our Stolen Future, which revealed that synthetic chemicals could interfere with the endocrine system, the body’s main communications network, and upset normal reproductive and developmental processes. In the ten years since the book’s publication, the authors have continued to report the evidence that hormone-disrupting chemicals are contributing to chronic diseases.
But Myers believes the emerging science carries with it an important silver lining: “It’s telling us that a much larger proportion of the human body burden of disease is preventable,” Myers says. “I think that’s really good news.”
So just tell me which brands not to buy. Just tell me which ingredients to avoid.
The good news is, safer products are already on the market and the tools are available to help consumers make smart choices. A smart place to start your research is EWG’s Skin Deep database, which offers brand-by-brand comparisons of 25,000 products, matching the ingredients up against the latest data from government and academic databases.
A guideline I find helpful: Simpler is better. Use fewer products with fewer chemical ingredients, and use them less often. Avoid “fragrance” and petro-chemical ingredients such as parabens, PEG, sodium laureth sulfate, DEA and other synthetic substances that are either toxic or may be contaminated with carcinogenic impurities. Certain product categories can go altogether — “air freshener,” for instance, is an added dose of unnecessary chemicals. Soaking in a hot bath full of synthetic chemicals isn’t the best idea either.
But it’s also important to recognize that we can’t just shop our way out of this problem. Ultimately, we need to change the laws so that companies are required to phase out hazardous chemicals and develop non-toxic alternatives — so that all of us, even the make-up divas among us, can go into any store anywhere and buy products that we know are safe for our bodies and our babies.
Stacy Malkan is the author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry (New Society Publishers, Oct. 2007), which tells the inside story of the campaign by health groups to pressure the U.S. cosmetics industry to use safer ingredients. Ms. Malkan is the communications director of Health Care Without Harm and a co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. Read the Toxic Beauty Blog at NotJustaPrettyFace.org.
The Beauty Industry’s Dirty Little Secrets
As if it weren’t challenging enough to decipher complicated labels and memorize chemicals to avoid, consumers have another hurdle to overcome in choosing safe cosmetics: Many products on the shelves today are contaminated with hidden toxic chemicals that aren’t listed on labels. Here are three examples:
Lead in lipstick According to product tests released last month by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, popular brands of lipstick contain surprisingly high levels of lead — a proven neurotoxin that can cause learning, language and behavioral problems. The tests revealed that more than half of 33 top-brand lipsticks tested contained detectable levels of lead, with levels ranging from .03 to .65 parts per million (ppm). One third of the lipsticks exceeded the .1 ppm FDA lead limit for candy — a standard established to protect children from directly ingesting lead. Lipstick is also ingested into the body, yet FDA has not set a lead limit for lip products.
1,4 dioxane in baby shampoo Product tests released last January by author and researcher David Steinman found carcinogenic 1,4-dioxane in more than a dozen popular brands of baby shampoo and children’s bubble bath, including Sesame character brands. 1,4 dioxane is considered a probable human carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a clear-cut animal carcinogen by the National Toxicology Program. Because 1,4 dioxane is a contaminant produced during manufacturing, the FDA does not require it to be listed as an ingredient on product labels.
Phthalates in fragranced products Tests conducted by environmental groups in 2002 found phthalates — a set of industrial chemicals linked to birth defects and infertility — in more than 70 percent of personal care products tested, including top-selling shampoos, deodorants, hair sprays and perfumes. Because of an FDA labeling loophole that allows companies to keep secret the ingredients in “fragrance,” none of the products listed phthalates on the label.
So what should savvy consumers do? As the above examples show, consumers don’t have the necessary information to make smart choices at the store just by reading labels. One way to be better informed is to use the Skin Deep database to search for products without petro-chemicals that are prone to contamination; see cosmeticdatabase.org. Using fewer products with fewer ingredients (and no fragrance) is another way to reduce risk. But the long-term solution is to change the laws to require companies to remove toxic ingredients and to list all product components on labels.
For more information about the product tests described above and to find out which brands tested positive for toxicants, see safecosmetics.org.