How Toxic are your Beauty Products?

Did you know that companies can put just about any ingredient they like into beauty and personal care products? Alarmingly, in the US, the government doesn’t require safety tests before these items hit the department store shelves.

Considering your skin is your body’s biggest organ, there’s something very wrong with this careless (and deadly) practice carried out by many manufacturers that make up the multi-billion dollar beauty industry. Just as the skin absorbs nutrients, it is also a sponge for toxins-including chemical-laden beauty creams, serums, scrubs sprays, body washes and the like.

With glamorous packaging and promises of younger looking skin in five minutes, it’s little wonder many of us have these toxic chemicals lurking in designer bottles in our bathrooms. But how do you know what ingredients are harmful?

The Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep website pairs ingredients in more than 42,000 products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory databases, making it the largest integrated data resource of its kind. You can literally enter an ingredient and the Skin Deep database will return a hazard score, specifically relating to how likely it is to cause cancer and other serious dis-eases.

If it all gets too confusing, considering the sheer amount of ingredients in any one product, a good rule of thumb is, if you can’t eat it, don’t use it.