Successfully navigating the beauty aisles is, in my mind, equivalent to learning another language.  Ethlyparaben. Polyethylene glycol. Phenoxyethanol. See? So, why should you learn to speak label-ese? Well, for starters your skin is the body’s largest organ and it absorbs 60% of what you put on it … making it the biggest gateway for toxins to get inside.

One in eight of the 82,000 ingredients used in personal care products are industrial chemicals, including carcinogens, pesticides, reproductive toxins, and hormone disruptors. (Click here for more info)

Who then is regulating what goes into beauty products sold in North America? The short answer is no one.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency charged with the oversight of cosmetics, apparently has no authority to regulate what goes into cosmetics before they are released making them among the least-regulated products on the market. In fact, 89 percent of all ingredients in cosmetics haven’t been evaluated for safety by any publicly accountable institution. Seriously?!

But if you know what to look out for (click here) shopping for beauty products can still be fun and not an exercise in linguistics.

Thanks for reading!

Tweet

Leave a Comment