Put On Your Best Face

Potentially hazardous chemicals could be lurking in your cosmetics

CONSUMERS put a lot of faith in the companies that make the products they apply to their teeth, hair, skin and lips. They dont expect that a sunscreen made to protect against sunburn and melanoma contains chemicals that might trigger other types of cancer or disrupt their hormones. Or that lipstick, eye shadow and other makeup products that mask their blemishes and enhance their natural beauty expose them to heavy metals and preservatives like formaldehyde.

Consumers want to believe the reassurances of government agencies and scientific panels funded by cosmetics companies that dosage

matters when evaluating how harmful chemical ingredients are and that cosmetics are safe when used as directed. But high-profile lawsuits, like the recent ruling in a personal injury case against Johnson & Johnson by 22 women who blamed their ovarian cancers on asbestos-contaminated talcum powder, are prompting consumers to question those assumptions — especially after learning that Johnson & Johnson knew about the risks for decades.

Consumers are demanding more transparency and oversight of a lightly regulated global industry, which Orbis Research valued at $532 billion in 2017, and are turning to allies in nonpartisan consumer-protection groups, such as the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (CSC), for information about hazardous chemicals and compounds found in makeups, lotions, sunscreens and other personal-care products.

Spotty regulation

Consumers looking for facts about beauty and other personalcare products might be surprised to learn how little power the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) exercises over the cosmetics industry before a product goes to market. The Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938, for example, “does not require cosmetic products and ingredients, other than color additives, to have FDA approval before they go on the market,” the federal agency’s website explains. The FDA can prohibit the marketing of adulterated or misbranded products, but the agency often doesn’t know if a product is “misbranded” until after the fact, after large numbers of people suffer from its use.

Misbranding includes failure to disclose ingredients or to alert buyers that “the safety of this product has not been determined,” the FDA website states. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act authorize the FDA to regulate cosmetic labeling and to require that cosmetic products sold online, in stores and in person list ingredients by their common names “in descending order of predominance.”

Fragrances are one exception to this rule. The FDA does not require the disclosure of individual components of fragrance additives, many of which are “particularly toxic,” said Nneka Leiba, director of EWG’s Healthy Living Science program. The more than 3,100 chemicals in this category can be marketed with descriptive labels like exotic or floral, thus disguising a “complex cocktail of natural essences and synthetic chemicals — often petrochemicals.” ven when ingredients are listed, their potential dangers divulged, leaving U.S. consumers unaware of g. The uncertainty is even greater with e United States, according to an August e that noted the FDA’s limited resources

00 foreign companies, only a few of which have voluntarily registered with the agency. In random tests of imported products, FDA inspectors have reported finding mercury, bacterial contamination and color additives that are illegal for U.S. cosmetics manufacturers to use.

Worry or no worries?

The Personal Care Products Council (PCPC), a trade association representing the global cosmetics and personal care products industry, rejects claims that ingredients found in U.S.-made cosmetics are unsafe when used as directed and protests that human-made chemicals are unfairly impugned by the “clean” cosmetics sector. PCPC asserts that self-regulation provides sufficient consumer protection and opposes legislation, such as the Personal Care Products Safety Act, introduced in 2017, that would empower the FDA to order product recalls and mandate annual reviews of especially controversial cosmetic contaminants. If the act becomes law, the first five substances to be reviewed by the agency would be diazolidinyl urea, used as a preservative in deodorants, shampoos, conditioners, bubble bath and lotions; lead acetate, used as a color additive in hair dyes; methylene glycol/formaldehyde, used in hair treatments; propyl paraben, used as a preservative in a range of products, including shampoos, conditioners and lotions; and quaternium-15, used as a preservative in shampoos, shaving cream, skin creams, cleansers and other products.

“Consumers have a right to know the facts about the products and ingredients they use, but they also have a right to understand” the scientific basis for product risk assessment, a PCPC representative told Healthy Living in an email interview. “The most important thing to understand about ingredient safety is that the dose truly does make the poison. Water is an essential component for life, and reasonable amounts obviously pose no harm; too much water, however, can be fatal. … Mushrooms as a family … include both poisonous toadstools and edible nutritious mushrooms. The same principles can be applied to cosmetics ingredients.”

Since 1976, the industry-funded Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) panel has “examined and evaluated scientific safety data for ingredients used in cosmetics and personal care products in the U.S. and conducts those evaluations in an open, unbiased and expert manner,” the PCPC representative said. The scientists and physicians on the CIR panel, which claims to be independent of industry influence, are nominated by industry, government agencies and consumer, scientific and medical groups and “must meet the same ‘conflict of interest’ standards FDA sets for members of its advisory committees,” the PCPC representative said. “CIR’s final reports are anonymously peer reviewed before they are published in the

PCPC hosts the cosmeticsinfo.org webpage, where visitors can type in a chemical name and read about any ingredient that concerns them. They will find links to CIR and FDA studies and the conclusions that CIR and FDA scientists have reached about that chemical or compound. An example is coal tar, a known human carcinogen and endocrine disruptor. Cosmeticsinfo. org notes that the FDA permits the use of coal tar in over-thecounter treatments for dandruff and psoriasis at concentrations of 0.5 to 5 percent. It adds that the CIR expert panel “concluded . . . that the available data are insufficient to support the safety of Coal Tar for use in cosmetics products other than those specifically approved by the FDA for [over-the-counter] use.”

EWG and CSC argue that what looks like impartiality and neutrality in evaluations like this minimizes potential problems associated with long-term use or overuse of inherently hazardous chemicals. Both groups urge consumers to read labels and reject products made with such chemicals — not only to protect themselves but also to force the industry to change.

Both organizations operate certification services — EWG Verified and Made Safe — which are similar to programs used to designate foods as organic or gluten free. The groups also share the names of companies that offer toxin-free alternatives (see sidebars). And EWG’s Cosmetics Database shares results of studies conducted on the deadliest ingredients found in tens of thousands of health and beauty products made or sold in the U.S. and rates products on a toxicity scale.

As manufacturers and their critics battle for political influence and public trust, consumers will have to choose whether to believe that small amounts of toxic chemicals won’t hurt them or to support companies that don’t force them to make such choices.