What we slather on ourselves isn’t always pretty
In Toxin Toxout, Canadian authors and environmentalists Bruce Lourie and Rick Smith reveal the parabens lurking in beauty products
From the mountain of evidence linking phthalates to human health concerns, I turned next to another chemical that many alert consumers are now trying to avoid: parabens. Hormonally active chemicals that, like phthalates, mimic estrogen in the human body, parabens are added to countless consumer products — foods, pharmaceuticals and beauty products including antiperspirants and deodorants — as a preservative. Given their widespread use, it’s not surprising that they’re now found in the bodies of most people, including 95 per cent of the American population. Though parabens have not been scientifically scrutinized nearly as much as phthalates have, the examination of this preservative and its effects inside the human body is beginning to intensify. If there is one researcher in the world who can claim to have brought parabens into the public eye, it’s Dr. Philippa Darbre of the University of Reading in England.
In a widely cited 2004 study, Dr. Darbre and her colleagues found parabens in human breast tissue. “There was a bit of a furor,” Darbre told me over the phone from her laboratory.
“Up to that point, it had been assumed that parabens, once they entered the human body, would be broken down by the liver. But something different altogether happens when they’re applied directly to the skin: The parabens bypass the liver and remain intact.”
Darbre told me she was struck by the way that breast cancers often develop. “Between 50 and 60 per cent of breast cancers start in the upper-outer quadrant of the breast, near the armpit.”
To explain why this is completely disproportionate and striking, she gave me a crash course in breast anatomy. “The breast is divided into seven regions: four quadrants, a central region, a nipple area and an axillary (or armpit) region.
So if breast cancer started equally across all areas of the breast, we would expect to see less than 20 per cent of cancers originating in each of those regions. But we don’t, and 50 to 60 per cent are up there in the upper-outer quadrant. Why? Is it because of all the chemicals being applied to that region?”
This question has driven her to research the possible link between underarm products and breast cancer for more than 15 years.
To further her 2004 study, Darbre continued to look for parabens in sample breast tissue from radical mastectomies. This time she used an even larger sample, and her suspicions were confirmed. “Not only did we repeat our 2004 results, but we actually found even fourfold higher paraben levels in these samples.”
More interesting (and worrisome) in terms of implications for human health was the significant difference in levels of one paraben chemical in different parts of the breast. “Propyl paraben did seem to have a gradient, with more found in the axilla region than in the inner regions, which you might expect is coming from the underarm.”
Do parabens cause breast cancer? As any cautious scientist would do, Darbre is quick to put her experimental results in context. “The fact that they’re in the breast doesn’t mean that there’s necessarily a relationship with breast cancer. It’s the first question. If they’re not getting into the breast, then they can’t have any effect on breast cancer.”
But even if they don’t cause cancer, there may be other effects. Although cancer is the main concern, it actually represents only about 5 per cent of clinical abnormalities of the human breast, with benign conditions such as breast cysts being the most common.
In response to the many women writing to her and complaining about painful breast cysts, Darbre has started looking into aluminum levels in breasts. Here again she has found strong evidence linking antiperspirant use with disease. Aluminum is a common component of antiperspirants because it helps keep sweat off the wearer’s skin by blocking sweat ducts. Breast cysts also occur when sweat ducts don’t drain properly. Darbre has found strong evidence that, like parabens, aluminum levels are highest in the part of the breast near the armpit — also where a disproportionate amount of breast cysts are found — and that aluminum levels are higher in the fluid of breast cysts than in other parts of the body. Pretty convincing stuff.
What’s the response of the chemical industry to Darbre’s work? Although the presence of parabens and aluminum in breast tissue (specifically, in the part of the breast most likely to manifest disease) is now undeniable, the industry says that the levels of parabens are too minute to matter.
Even on this question, Darbre has tried to respond directly with further experimentation. Though manufacturers defend their particular parabens, it’s not the fact that there is one type of paraben in breast tissue that’s the problem, Darbe maintains; it’s the fact that there are many. Parabens are a family of chemicals, and it’s the effect of this potentially toxic and potent mixture that’s the worry. In her most recent study, she took various parabens at the same concentrations she has measured in the human body and demonstrated that, in combination, they have an effect. “To my knowledge,” she told me, “this is the first science suggesting that parabens have the capability of turning a normal breast cell into a transformed breast cell.”
Transformed cells cannot be controlled by the body’s normal processes and may be indicative of progression to a cancerous state. Scientists are producing a body of data leading to some valid concerns about parabens. But on the flip side, where is the data supporting claims that parabens are safe? As Darbre put it: “Where are the data showing that if you put parabens into all these things that get into people at all levels . . . that there are no effects? There aren’t any such data. And my interpretation is that the current data imbalance is making companies nervous. Unfortunately, we are exposed to many chemicals each day that mimic estrogen and that have complementary action.”
In her own life, Darbre uses as few of these products as possible. . . . There is growing evidence that sweating is actually an important mechanism of the body’s detox system: The more you sweat, the more toxic chemicals you get rid of. Our over-air-conditioned, sweat-averse society’s antiperspirant habit reduces our body’s ability to clean itself while slathering on nasty pollutants. A double toxic whammy.
‘A whole new ball game’ I will confess that, in university, when my hipster friends were avoiding deodorant and rubbing crystals under their arms, I . . . was not. I value personal hygiene and a relative lack of stench from my fellow humans. Until I started writing this chapter, I still clung to my not infrequent use of Mitchum antiperspirant. Why? It works. As my grandmother always used to say, “Horses sweat, men perspire and women glow.” I was going one further by trying not to perspire at all. With Toronto being 40 degrees Celsius for many days during the summer I was doing interviews and writing this book, I knew it would be hard to be taken seriously if I was perspiring through my shirt.
But there are now better ways to deal with the problem. Quite simply, sustainable cosmetics are more popular because products have become much better.
Just how much better was sketched out for me by Judi Beerling, Organic Monitor’s Technical Research Manager. After working for over 30 years in the conventional cosmetics industry, Beerling decided that the formulation of conventional cosmetics had become “a bit stagnant, with everybody doing the same sorts of things over and over.” She was enticed to begin concocting formulations for sustainable cosmetics companies because of the intellectual challenge. She told me she now works out of a special lab she built for herself in her back garden.
When it comes to sustainable cosmetics, she told me during a coffee break at the New York Sustainable Cosmetics Summit, “it’s a whole new ball game.”
Five years ago, Beerling figured, you could really make only basic products. “Now you can make very elegant products that you would be hard pressed to distinguish from conventional cosmetics. Whether you can make them at the same cost, of course, is not so easy.”
As a rough approximation, Beerling estimated that “85-to-90 per cent of the ingredients and techniques [needed] to make sustainable cosmetics are now available, and this is increasing literally on a weekly basis. Now the challenge is to figure out how to combine them to get the best effect and to make the best cosmetics we can.”
Hands down, the No. 1 remaining challenge for formulating sustain- able cosmetics, according to a number of people I interviewed at the summit, is the creation of effective preservatives to replace parabens. Curt Valva explained the problem succinctly: “Many of our products are water based. Things with high water content have to be preserved because as soon as you introduce water to something, bacterial growth starts immediately. You need something to either keep the bacteria from growing at its normal level, like we would have in drinking water, or kill it completely. The problem is those things that kill bacteria are also really not good for the human body. They’re designed to kill cells — that’s what they do.”
It’s particularly important, Valva told me, to keep products like mascara, which are applied near the eye, clean and totally free from mould, fungus and bacteria.
And now, the experiment After doing a ton of research into the alleged merits of green personalcare products, I decided that some more direct testing of our own was in order. The idea was pretty simple. I asked for volunteers: Ray Civello of Aveda and Jessa Blades, one of Glamour magazine’s 70 eco-heroes and the TreeHugger website’s Best Green Makeup Artist for 2011, were up to the challenge. We wanted to look at the day-to-day differences in our participants’ phthalate and paraben levels as they made the switch from using conventional chemicalladen, personal-care products to products that claimed to be greener and, notionally, safer. The hitch with Civello and Blades is that they’d long ago made the switch to natural products: They were already big believers in the notion that the first step in detoxing is to avoid harmful toxins. For the purpose of our experiment, we asked them to go back — just for a day. Based on consultation with experts like Dr. Shanna Swan, we designed our protocol as follows. On Day One, our participants had to undergo a 24-hour “washout” phase, which really just meant avoiding the use of any cosmetics or personal-care products as much as possible. The logic behind this washout is that chemicals like phthalates and parabens are excreted in the urine, usually within 6 to 12 hours of application/ingestion/inhalation. After 24 hours of cosmetics-free living, our participants gave their first urine samples on Day Two at 8 a.m. That sample was used to establish their body baseline levels for the phthalates and parabens we were examining. Immediately following the first urine collection, Civello and Blades each did a one-time application of the conventional products we had sent them. With the help of a study on chemicals in consumer products from the Silent Spring Institute and the EWG’s Skin Deep Cosmetics database, we selected products that we were pretty sure contained phthalates and parabens aplenty. Another urine collection was done at both the four-hour (noon) and the six-hour (2 p.m.) post-application marks, for a total of three urine samples from each for the first phase of the experiment. Following the 2 p.m. collection, we again asked our volunteers to refrain from using any more cosmetics for the duration of the second washout, which would end at 8 a.m. on Day Four. The second phase of the experiment played out the same as the first, with urine collections at 8 a.m., noon and 2 p.m. The only difference was that in this phase, Civello and Blades would be applying the natural products listed in the notes for this chapter after their 8 a.m. sample. So there you have it. After a total of 8 days, 12 samples and over 50 cosmetic products (oh, and a somewhat sleepless night as I worried about the impact Hurricane Sandy would have on New York City and subsequently the fate of Blades’s urine in her Brooklyn freezer), the urine was packed up and sent off to a lab in British Columbia to be analyzed for various phthalates and parabens. Our participants were good sports about the whole thing. When I spoke to Civello as he was doing the first washout, he told me he was interested to see if his colleagues would notice: “I’ve smelled the same way for 25 years. I have a distinctive aroma that people know me by. People usually say to me, ‘Man, you smell good.’ ” The day he walked down his office hallway stinking of Axe body spray rather than Aveda’s distinctive rosemary mint, he did indeed turn some heads. “We’re really confused as to what clean smells like,” Blades quipped over the phone, having a hard time adjusting to her new-found synthetic scent. Blades doesn’t normally wear strong perfumes, as she’s wary of their undisclosed ingredients. But as a professional makeup artist, she concedes that there’s no question that long-wear conventional products work. “If you put plastic into a product, it’ll stay on. Put some of this lipstick on the back of my hand and it stays there. But women don’t have to wear waterproof mascara every day. They have to wear mascara that doesn’t burn their eyes and that doesn’t make their eyelashes fall out.” The results of our experiment were very convincing. Blades’s initial level of mono-ethyl phthalate (MEP) went from a low of 6.09 ng/mL to a high of 346 ng/mL then back down to 12.6 ng/mL. Her methyl paraben levels started at 5.17ng/mL, went all the way up to 805 ng/mL and then dropped to 7.69 ng/mL. Civello’s levels followed the same pattern: His base MEP level was 143 ng/mL, it peaked at 786 ng/ mL and fell to 99.3 ng/mL, and his methyl paraben went from a low of 2.45 ng/mL to 206 ng/mL and then dropped back to 4.29 ng/mL. The levels of phthalates and parabens we found in our study match other data in scientific literature looking at levels of these chemicals after topical application of cosmetics. While both Civello’s and Blades’s phthalate and paraben levels spiked dramatically after their use of the conventional cosmetics, they declined dramatically during the subsequent washout phase of the experiment.
Significantly, phthalate and paraben levels continued to fall even after application of the green personalcare products. The results from this experiment certainly support Blades’s point. Women and men don’t have to wear this stuff every day. Nor do they have to wear sackcloth and go without cosmetics entirely to avoid synthetic chemicals. Excerpted from Toxin Toxout: Getting Harmful Chemicals Out of Our Bodies and Our World. Copyright © 2013 Bruce Lourie and Rick Smith. Published by Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.