The Case Against Chemicals in Cosmetics

1. The Case Against Chemicals in Cosmetics What’s in your deodorant?

2. Introduction • Women are exposed to thousands of cosmetics and personal care products (PCPs) over the course of a life time. • This includes deodorant shampoo, sunscreen hairspray, perfume, makeup • Increasing amounts of industrial grade chemicals make those products last longer, smell nicer, and perform better • Many of these chemicals are toxic

3. What’s wrong with chemicals? • Only 11 percent of the 10,500 PCP ingredients that the FDA has documented have been assessed for safety by the cosmetic industry's review panel (EWG 2006) • Many of these chemicals have already been classified as toxic, endocrine disrupting, or carcinogenic by the FDA • They are limited in food, yet the cosmetic industry is allowed to use unknown amounts

4. Well, I’m not dead…yet • There have been no studies on outcome of repeated, long term, low level exposures to chemicals in cosmetics, thus the hazard to human health is unknown (Harvey and Everett 2006) • When some are eaten they are metabolized by the liver, and pass out of the body • When applied cosmetically, they are absorbed into fat which stays in the body

5. But I’m not a fish… • This is especially important to women since they have a higher fat content than men • Darbre (2006) suggests that one direct route may be the exposure via the long-term, regular application to the underarm and breast area of a variety of cosmetic ingredients • Babies exposed to contaminated breast milk may suffer developmental defects

6. Emergence of new research suggesting the link between endocrine-disrupting components and cancer, deserves investigation into individual and combined chemicals. The long-term use of product formulations at lower levels over an entire lifetime warrants retrospective investigation.