The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep website gives you health skinny on all the ingredients in the potions and lotions you keep around the house. The site, at www.ewg.org/reports/skindeep2, wins smart design points with its search options, too: You can search by brand, product or ingredient, and the listings provide comprehensive information on relevant toxins and hazards. It’s a good thing, too, since no one else is on the lookout. “The FDA cannot require companies to do safety testing of their products before marketing,” stated the FDA Office of Cosmetics and Colors in 1995, and that hasn’t changed.
Search by brand, product or ingredient to find comprehensive info on relevant toxins and hazards in your beauty products.
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Yikes. What’s more, just because it’s O.K. to put chemicals on your eyelids for a day doesn’t mean that the buildup over the years is safe. According to EWG, currently “safe” substances found in cosmetics include known immune system toxicants, endocrine disruptors and cancer hazards, all of which are used in nontoxic amounts in individual products; however, if you’re like most people, you use an average of 10 products per day (soap, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, makeup, perfume, etc.). The Skin Deep site states that “a coalition of health and environmental groups, including the EWG and the Breast Cancer Fund, is working with manufacturers to eliminate or reformulate chemical ingredients suspected of hazards as mild as skin irritation and as serious as cancer, genetic mutation and nerve damage.”—K.C.
