What’s really in your lipstick?
Now there’s an app that ranks the safety of chemicals in cosmetics
Lily Tse became concerned about chemicals in cosmetics after her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer for a second time.
While investigating the beauty industry, she found most labels hard to read and difficult to understand.
“They’re in very small print and they’re in words that no one knows how to pronounce,” Tse said.
So the Toronto entrepreneur developed Think Dirty (thinkdirtyapp.com), an app to help consumers navigate the cosmetics aisle.
Downloaded to your smartphone, it can be used to scan and decipher the bar code of more than 80,000 cosmetic and personal-care products, and will rank each on its “dirty” meter — 0 being the safest products, 10 the most questionable.
“Think Dirty was a project born out of a personal passion to find out the truth in the beauty industry,” Tse said.
To rank products, Think Dirty uses information provided by doz- ens of sources, including the David Suzuki Foundation’s Dirty Dozen List and the Health Canada Hotlist. Products ranked eight to 10 contain ingredients with potentially serious long-term health effects such as cancer and reproductive and developmental problems. The app describes the ingredients and their known implications for health, and then offers substitutes for cleaner products.
“All of this information exists in other places, but it’s buried in documents or on web pages where it takes you five clicks to find it. I wanted to create something that was easy to use and in plain English from credible sources, so (consumers) can make an informed decision.”
Since its October launch, the free app has been downloaded more than 80,000 times. It’s only for iPhone, but is expected to be available for Android devices this summer.
Rick Smith, environmentalist and coauthor of Toxin Toxout, supports the app.
He said cosmetic labelling re- quirements are full of loopholes. Fragrance is one example. “The word fragrance can encompass dozens of individually badly tested chemicals,” Smith said.
Because they are considered trade secrets, companies aren’t required to label individual chemicals that go into the fragrance formulation. The Dirty Meter app uncovers this.
Take Burt’s Bees, a cosmetics company that advertises itself as Earth friendly, yet its Peach & Willowbark Deep Pore Scrub rated a nine on the dirty meter. The reason? Fragrance. Tse said her app rated the product low based on that one ingredient.
“If you go to any hospital, (you’ll see) that fragrances are banned. There’s a reason for that.”
Many people have allergic reactions to fragrances. In f act, when Tse was doing research in drugstore cosmetic aisles she sneezed often and even felt ill.
Products labelled fragrance-free can rate poorly on Think Dirty, too. Marcelle’s Bronzing Pressed Pow- der, a product labelled 100 per cent perfume-free and paraben-free, got a nine because it contained diazolidinyl urea, a preservative the David Suzuki Foundation identified on its Dirty Dozen List as a carcinogen.
Critics of the app say it only tells half the story. Think Dirty doesn’t tell you how much or how little of the ingredient is in the product, said Darren Praznik, president of the Canadian Cosmetics, Toiletries and Fragrance Association.
Many ingredients identified as dirty appear in tiny amounts, he said, citing the example of lead in lipstick. Maybelline’s Color Sensational Lipstick 125 Pink Petal, for example, which contains lead, pulled a nine on the dirty meter.
“When Health Canada reviewed lead in lipstick in 2008, it found you would have to eat five tubes of lipstick a day for lead to be of (health) concern,” Praznik said.
However, Sharima Rasanayagam, director of science for the Breast Cancer Fund, said any amount of a dangerous substance should be avoided.