Beauty Secrets

A closer look at a product’s label can help you find the healthiest cosmetics on the market.

By Emily Main • Photograph by Johnny Miller

 

You’ve decided to go green. You’ve switched to hormone-free beef, started riding a bicycle and begun cleaning with baking soda and vinegar to protect your lungs. But every morning you unwittingly cover your face with petroleum-based and chemical-filled cosmetics that you’re convinced are needed to care for your skin and enhance your looks.

Cosmetics contain a long list of chemicals, most synthetic and petroleum-based, that trigger health problems as mild as skin irritation and as severe as cancer, neurological damage and disruption of the body’s hormone systems. However, in this self-regulated industry, the federal government doesn’t require manufacturers to demonstrate the safety of their products’ ingredients, and the FDA and the industry’s Cosmetic Ingredient Review have safety information on only 11 percent of the 10,500 ingredients currently in use.

State governments, fed up with this lack of oversight, have started instituting their own rules. California, for instance, passed the Safe Cosmetics Act, effective January 2007, requiring companies that sell makeup

in California to report the use of compounds that appear on the state’s Proposition 65 list of chemicals known to cause cancer, birth defects and/or reproductive harm. This past January, the Minnesota legislature banned the use of mercury as a preservative in mascara, eyeliners and skin-lightening creams (the FDA allows a small amount of mercury in eye cosmetics if no viable alternative is available).

If you don’t live in either California or Minnesota, an obvious solution would seem to be “organic” or “natural” products. But those labels offer no assurance of safety. Neither term is regulated for cosmetics, and any company wanting to market itself as healthier or somehow less chemically dependent can use them on product labels, regardless of content.

Shoppers can have some confidence in USDA-certified organic cosmetics, which adhere to the same rules as organic food. However, the Consumers Union Eco Labels center ( greenerchoices.org/eco-labels) considers the USDA’s personal care standards iffy, at best, because it found that many certified-organic products also contain

synthetic ingredients not reviewed by the National Organic Standards Board.

The term “natural” is meaningless, even if printed on an earthy-looking label bedecked with green leaves. “Some companies will have one plant extract in a product and call it natural,” says Dr. Daniel Fabricant, vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs at the Natural Products Association (NPA), a trade group. “We did a survey on natural personal care,” adds Mike Indursky, CMO of Burt’s Bees, “and found that 78 percent of women believe that natural personal care products are regulated, that there’s some governing body ensuring a product is really natural.” And that’s not the case.

Indursky now chairs an NPA-supported working group that includes representatives from respected eco-friendly product manufacturers like California Baby and Aubrey Organics, among others, all of whom are developing a third-party “natural” certification. “We’re looking to really quit the cowboy use of the term ‘natural,’” says Fabricant.

Administered by the NPA, this new certification will require 95 percent of a product’s ingredients to be natural, “ meaning flora, fauna—or animal byproducts, such as milk, honey and beeswax, that come at no harm to the animal—and mineral,” Indursky says. Synthetic ingredients