3 Beauty and Bodycare Ingredients to Avoid
Posted
Friday, April 04, 2008 6:31 PM
Suddenly it seems like a new “organic” or “natural” line of beauty products is released every day. Even mainstream brands like Physician’s Formula and Origins are putting out a few green products. The problem is, it’s hard to understand what the labels mean, because the term “natural” isn’t regulated for personal care products, and the term “organic” is regulated in sort of a weird way. This article give the low-down on what a “USDA organic” seal means for beauty products. The thing that I find really tricky about it is that a product made with 95% organic ingredients can get the seal, but still be awful for you if the other 5% percent are harsh chemicals. And distressingly, a new study just came out revealing that even some of the most hippie-ish beauty brands contain a contaminant called 1, 4 dioxane!
What’s a trying-to-be green girl or guy to do? Unfortunately, you have to become a bit of a sleuth and read ingredients lists (I know, like you have time for this . . ) before you buy. You could say that as a general rule unfamiliar, hard-to-pronounce ingredients are bad, but that’s not always true. For instance, tocopherol nicotinate sounds totally scary, but is actually just a form of Vitamin E. Meanwhile, the innocent-seeming word “fragrance” is an alias for all sorts of toxic stuff.
Here are the three ingredients I look for on product labels—and if a lotion or potion contains one I put it back on the shelf and move on:
Fragrance: Product makers aren’t required to list the specific ingredients that go into their fragrances, and most synthetic fragrances contain phthalates, plus a bunch of other possibly dangerous chemicals. To play it safe, only use products that are scented with essential oils. (Confusingly, even products labeled “unscented” often aren’t safe, because the manufacturer might have used a chemical “masking” scent to make the product not smell like anything. So look for the word “fragrance” on the labels of unscented products too.)
Methylparaben, propylparaben, anything that ends in “paraben”: These chemicals are usually lurking at the bottom of ingredients lists. They’re a type of preservative that nearly every mainstream beauty product contains, and they’ve been linked to reproductive problems.
Triclosan: This antibacterial, which is found in many cleansers, lotions and toothpastes, has been linked to cancer and hormone disruption.
I need to emphasize that this is NOT AT ALL a comprehensive list of all the harmful chemicals to avoid in your beauty/bodycare buying. It’s just that I don’t have time to memorize every possible hazard, and in general if something doesn’t contain any of these it means that the manufacturer is probably pretty sincere with its pure/non-toxic intentions. But you can look up any ingredient, and almost any product, on this Cosmetics Safety Database which explains, much, much better than I can, what to avoid as well as which products are actually safe.