Caveat Emptor Means Buyer Beware

Many people in the German-speaking countries of Austria, Germany, and parts of Switzerland can look at a product label and say, “I would never buy this product because it contains these toxic ingredients.” They educate themselves about what they use and display a sensitivity to what is safe, in contrast to most U.S. consumers, who remain uninformed. Even the majority of U.S. toxicologists are poorly informed about the toxic ingredients in everyday consumer products. This lack of awareness among North Americans is one of the reasons why I felt the strong need to write this book.

U.S. consumers generally assume that if any cosmetic or personal-care product posed a danger to health, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would warn us. This faith and trust is woefully misplaced. A tragic example occurred in April 2007, when a seventeen-year-old cross-country runner at Notre Dame Academy on Staten Island, New York, died after absorbing high levels of a chemical ingredient from sports creams she had applied to her skin. The track star’s mother still could not believe a skin cream could kill and was quoted as telling reporters, “I did not think an over-the-counter product could be unsafe.”

Even though the 1938 Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act explicitly directs the FDA to require that “[t]he label of cosmetic products shall bear a warning statement ... to prevent a health hazard that may be associated with a product,” the FDA still marches to the beat of industry drummers’ assurances of safety. Most people would be surprised to learn that the 1938 Act does not require cosmetics or personal-care products and their ingredients to be approved as safe before they are marketed and sold to consumers. FDA oversight begins only after consumers have become guinea pigs in the marketplace—which often means after some of those consumers have become public health statistics.

Virtually everybody takes for granted that our everyday personal-care products and cosmetics are harmless and tested for safety. We also believe that the deodorants, shampoos, soaps, perfumes, lipsticks, and dozens of other common products in our lives are conveniences we should be entitled to enjoy without fear of any dangerous consequences. Healthy Beauty reveals a shocking truth—most of these products carry invisible price tags, with hidden costs to our health and to our lives.

Nearly one out of every two men and more than one out of every three women will get cancer in their lifetime. The cosmetics and personal-care product industries bear significant responsibility for this health crisis. Every day at least three personal-care products are applied to the skin of infants and children. Men use an average of ten, and women use six or more cosmetics and an average of thirteen personal-care products. Some products are used several times a day, such as fragranced soaps. If you add up all of the individual ingredients in each of these products, you discover that you expose yourself to dozens of toxins daily.

More than 10,500 personal-care and cosmetic products are sold in North America, yet few have ever been assessed for their impact on human health. The prevailing attitude of the industry and its individual companies—and the FDA—is that these products and their ingredients are innocent until proven guilty. So how is guilt established? When sufficient numbers of people sicken or die. But even that cruel standard fails to reveal the full dimensions of our health challenge, because the harm from these chemicals often occurs over extended periods of time and involves exposures to multiple toxic ingredients. There is no practical scientific way by which their toxic effects can be differentiated from the effects of exposure to other toxic industrial chemicals. The cosmetic and personal-care product industries use this uncertainty to create a smokescreen from behind which they claim that the concentrations of toxic ingredients in their products are too tiny and insignificant to cause harm.

To illustrate the dimensions of what we confront, consider the fact that at least 3,000 mostly synthetic chemicals are used in the U.S. by the fragrance industry alone. At least 900 of them have been identified as having some degree of toxicity by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. This is the main reason why this book spotlights labeling practices that mask and distort the identity of ingredients that could harm us. By hiding behind trade secrecy laws, manufacturers keep all of us ignorant about what really lurks inside their products, enabling them to cut corners, if not ignore safety altogether, to maximize their profits.

Some of the ingredients in these products become unwelcome squatters in our body fat and organs. More than 10,000 U.S. citizens of all ages and walks of life have had their blood tested over the past decade by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in attempts to determine the extent of the “body burden” of synthetic chemicals that we all absorb during the course of “normal” living. By even conservative estimates, we carry trace amounts of hundreds of these chemicals in our bodies at any one time. Many of these chemicals come from our daily contact with toxic ingredients in cosmetics and personal-care products.

Another group of toxic ingredients found in cosmetics and personal-care products, allergens, produce reactions on the skin and can sometimes become severe. As these ingredients have proliferated in products, sensitivity to these ingredients has spread within the general population. In the nearly thirty countries comprising the European Union, warning labels are required on perfumes and fragrances that contain twenty-six known allergens, while in the U.S. no such requirement exists. Even when U.S. companies label their products as “fragrance-free” or “hypoallergenic,” you cannot be sure this is the case: these terms are often misleading or meaningless because manufacturers are not required to test or prove these claims.

Cosmetics and personal-care products today constitute our single largest but generally unrecognized class of avoidable exposure to toxic ingredients and their health dangers. These products are so potentially dangerous because:

Our skin is highly permeable. Less than one-tenth of an inch thick, skin is a porous membrane that is highly sensitive to toxic chemicals. What we put on our skin affects our health just as much as, if not more than, what we put in our mouths.

Penetration enhancers make skin even more permeable. There is an entire category of chemicals used in many cosmetics and personal-care products, called “penetration enhancers,” that are designed to make other ingredients penetrate the skin more readily and deeply. A new penetration enhancer, minute atom-sized ingredients known as nanoparticles, is now being increasingly added to some of these products, notably sunblocks. These penetrating agents force anti-wrinkle cream, moisturizers, and other ingredients deep into the skin, where they can reach the bloodstream and, through it, the entire body, with unpredictable toxic effects.

Toxic ingredients applied to skin bypass liver enzymes. To varying degrees, all carcinogens and other toxic ingredients in personal-care and beauty products are absorbed through your skin, directly into your blood, and then circulate all over your body. These ingredients bypass the detoxifying enzymes in your liver that protect you from toxins in food. That means the harmful chemicals that you apply to your skin are much more toxic, and pose greater cancer and other risks, than if you ate them. To quote from Horst Rechelbacher, past president of Aveda and now CEO of Intelligent Nutrients, “Don’t put anything on your skin that you wouldn’t put in your mouth.”

Toxic ingredients produce cumulative effects. Your multiple everyday exposures to carcinogens and other toxins from multiple cosmetics and personal-care products pose unpredictable additional dangers to health. Some ingredients interact on your skin or in your body, adding to each other’s toxic effects. Other ingredients, when they interact, multiply their toxic effects, causing damage far beyond what any one toxin would have done on its own.

Exposure to toxic ingredients is prolonged. When you spray or roll deodorant under your arms, splash or rub perfume on yourself, or apply any other personal-care and beauty products, their ingredients can persist on your skin for extended periods, resulting in prolonged opportunity for absorption. Also, your exposure to these products started early, even in the womb, when your mother applied products to her body, absorbed many of them, and passed some on to you through the placenta.

Some elements of my message about the health impacts of our exposure to industrial chemicals has seeped into the popular press. Cancer researcher Devra Davis, Ph.D., writing in a February 2007 issue of Newsweek magazine, offered this warning: “We’re beginning to realize that the sum total of a person’s exposure to all the little amounts of cancerous agents in the environment may be just as harmful as big doses of a few well-known carcinogens. Our chances of getting cancer reflect the full gamut of carcinogens we’re exposed to each day—in air, water and food pollution and in cancerous ingredients or contaminants in household cleaners, clothing, furniture, and the dozens of personal-care products many of us use daily.”

You will learn in this book how preventable exposures to toxic ingredients in cosmetics and personal-care products take place daily in your home, as well as during every trip to your beauty or nail salon. You will also find out about safe alternatives, particularly organic, to most toxic ingredients, and what you can do to protect yourself, your family, and your friends.

This book will expose numerous self-serving industry myths. Prominent among them are the growing claims about anti-aging products. Over the past decade, our culture’s preoccupation with appearing youthful has inspired the industry to produce a line of products known as cosmeceuticals. Existing in a gray area between cosmetics and drugs, cosmeceuticals are now the fastest growing sector of the cosmetic industry and yet one of the least scrutinized. In these pages you will learn the disturbing truth about these products: that the great majority of them have highly questionable, if any, benefits, and many can be toxic.

Another myth revolves around how the chemical industry and its cosmetics and personal-care companies try to reassure us that, so long as carcinogenic ingredients or contaminant amounts remain below their arbitrarily defined “thresholds,” or safe limits, they create no toxic effects. The poison is only in the dose, they tell us, and claim (falsely) that the doses to which we are exposed are too low to be harmful. This mantra is misleading salesmanship rather than basic science. There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that there is no basis for assigning safe limits or thresholds for carcinogens. Self-interested attempts to argue or prove the contrary amount to a reckless abuse of consumer trust, and the health consequences of this abuse will be felt for generations to come.

An Information Deficit Exists

Cosmetics remain a huge and immensely profitable business, with annual sales of about $50 billion in the U.S. alone, and $2 billion spent on advertising. While there are hundreds of companies involved in this ever-growing business, most brands and products are controlled by just a few global giants, notably Estée Lauder, Max Factor, Procter & Gamble, Revlon, and L’Oreal, and their subsidiary companies.

Over a decade ago, during U.S. Senate committee hearings, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts warned the public that “[t]he cosmetics industry has borrowed a page from the playbook of the tobacco industry by putting profits ahead of public health.” As information in this book will demonstrate, the truth of that statement has since been more than adequately confirmed.

When we try to be conscientious in our buying choices, we face a series of virtually insurmountable obstacles to the exercise of common sense. It is not only trade secrecy that thwarts us in our attempts at self-education; there is also the confusion inherent in ingredient identification. While the U.S. and all other nations require the labeling of the ingredients in cosmetics and personal-care products, at best this is often uninformative. Labels present such an alphabet soup of complex chemical names that most of us need a toxicology dictionary to read them. But without guidance as to which ingredients are safe or harmful, such dictionaries will remain useless and consumers will continue to flounder blindly in uncertainty. This book is intended to help provide that guidance by demystifying the complicated ingredient names and the frequently misleading product labels they appear on. Consumers should have an absolute right to know—and understand—what carcinogens and other ingredients and contaminants are in their cosmetics and personal-care products.

Cosmetics and personal-care products remain unregulated by the FDA. There are no requirements for the safety testing of ingredients, or for label warnings identifying those ingredients known to pose cancer risk, hormonal danger, or allergenic and other toxic effects. Making matters worse, for decades the FDA has taken no regulatory action, such as seizure, recall, or requirement of “black box” warning labels, against products containing known toxic ingredients. Taking advantage of the FDA’s regulatory abdication, the cosmetics industry continues to market products containing toxic ingredients to unsuspecting consumers by boasting that if their products were unsafe, the FDA would alert us.

In recognition of these serious dangers and the virtual absence of information about them, the 1995 The Safe Shopper’s Bible, which I co-authored, reviewed some 4,000 U.S. consumer products. These included cosmetics and personal-care products, household products, and food. The book provided detailed, reader-friendly listings of ingredients that posed risks of cancer, allergy, and other toxic effects. It also provided information on safe alternative products, generally sold by small non-mainstream companies. The book was designed to encourage consumers to vote with their shopping dollars and, in the absence of needed regulation, tilt the marketplace in favor of safe alternative companies and products. Despite legal threats from unfavorably rated companies, the book was published and became a bestseller. Subsequently, I was and remain inundated with requests for further information from the public, news media, and also from a few companies whose products had been unfavorably rated and who have responsively sought safe alternatives. Healthy Beauty builds and expands on The Safe Shopper’s Bible to provide consumers with the most up-to-date and comprehensive information available on the range of unrecognized risks to health from exposure to toxic ingredients through cosmetics and personal-care products.

Safe Alternatives Have Emerged

Fortunately for all of us, and for future generations, a quiet revolution in our thinking and our approach toward toxins is now underway. This sea change in attitudes holds the promise of transforming our roles as consumers, while giving us the power to influence both the marketplace and the institutions that mold public policy concerning what is safe for us to consume.

This trend toward voluntary and economy-driven corporate consumerism and environmentalism takes many forms and has already proven superior to a reliance on ideological or legislative attempts to reduce toxin use. Consumers are banding together to punish chemically reckless companies by boycotting their products. Simultaneously they are rewarding the growing number of conscientious companies that market safe products based on readily available safe synthetic or organic ingredients. From 2002 to 2004, the number of new organic cosmetics and personal-care products more than doubled, from 350 to 840. Also, some supermarket and other chains began to develop their own organic product lines, to lower costs and entice more low-income customers. This book will show you how organic products are not only safer, but have become as effective as mainstream products containing toxic ingredients.

Given that we are exposed to hundreds of chemical pollutants every day in air, water, and food, you may wonder why we should focus on cosmetics and personal-care products. The answer is that, in contrast to pollutants in air and water, over which we have little or no control, we can exercise considerable control over what we put on our skin through personal choice. The toxins in cosmetics and personal-care products are not only the single most avoidable category of threats to our health, they are also the category with the widest range of emerging alternative safe products.

Risk prevention and safe alternatives to toxic chemicals are interconnected themes throughout these pages. Faced with the reckless indifference of the FDA, along with that of other arms of government, it is up to each of us to take the initiative in protecting our own health. In that spirit, it is our intent and our hope that this book will be a useful self-defense manual for protecting you and your family.