Ever wonder what is lurking in your lipstick? And what is it, exactly, that makes your mascara miraculously double your lashes? As much as I’d like to tick off a tally list of natural ingredients, quite often, it’d be impossible.
Unfortunately, the majority of cosmetics and personal care items are filled with almost any ingredient that the companies wish, and even more unfortunately, there isn’t any sort of government regulation and testing for safety before they’re sold.
To satisfy our needs to know what is actually natural, the Environmental Working Group developed a database called Skin Deep, a cosmetic safety resource that integrates product ingredients with toxicity databases.
After four years so far, it’s built itself to about 43,000 products, providing safety information about what is really in your everyday wear.
Each search provides a list of information based on their product information. It connects health issues, from cancer to allergies, that the specific ingredients in each product are linked with. It also indicates whether the products are tested on animals, and if the manufacturers have signed a pledge called the “Compact for Safe Cosmetics,” which specifies that they promise to formulate products that do not use ingredients that are known or suspected to cause certain health harms. Each product is given a hazard rating out of 10, as well as a “data gap” rating, which measures of how much is unknown about an ingredient. And as you reel in all of the info, the website gives you recommendations on how to make better choices, and specifies other brands of similar products with a better rating.
Searching by manufacturer also enables you see how their products average on a whole.
So is it really a big deal about the chemicals in your cosmetics? Research has shown that there may be long term effects linked to specific ingredients. The EWG adds: “The components of a product are not trace contaminants like those found at part-per-million or even part-per-billion levels in food and water. These are the base ingredients of the product, just as flour is an ingredient in bread. We are finding that many chemicals associated with health hazards are stored and accumulate in the body, many passing onto unborn children.”
Regardless if you’re interested in making the switch, you might be interested in taking a look at how your products compare, or finding an alternative that with a lower hazard risk.
Explore their resources at cosmeticsdatabase.com
Image courtesy of toxicbeauty.co.uk
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