Chemicals on your skin: what you don’t know can hurt you

‘Tis the season for fun-scented lotions, perfumes, and soaps, right?

When it comes to these products, we tend to hold a basic assumption about the ingredients: there can’t be anything in this that would really hurt me because the chemicals produced in the United States are regulated.

Unfortunately, that assumption is wrong.

Contrary to what we might wish, there is actually no governing body in the United States that tests or regulates the chemicals used in the body products that we put on ourselves, our children, and even our babies.

Instead, we trust chemical manufacturers to regulate themselves. Yes, the same companies that profit from cheaply manufacturing new chemicals and putting them on the market as quickly as possible are the same organizations that are supposedly in charge of determining whether something is “safe” to sell.

The Food and Drug Administration only regulates, well, food and drugs. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must meet a burden of proof including extensive scientific testing of a specific ingredient before starting the ball rolling on a long and complicated process to restrict that ingredient.

There is a single piece of federal legislation addressing dangerous chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. The TSCA approved the use of 60,000 chemicals that were on the market at that time, even though only 200 of those chemicals were ever tested. 5 of the 200 that were actually tested were eventually banned due to toxicity. Today there are 80,000+ chemicals on the market that have never been tested.

Why does what we put on our skin matter?

What we apply to our skin is absorbed directly into our blood stream, bypassing the filters of the liver and kidneys that we have in place for things we put into our body via our mouths (food). Think about how the smoking cessation patch or the birth control patch works — through absorption of the skin. Anything else applied to our skin, our body’s largest organ, is absorbed directly in the same way. The impact is especially significant on our children, whose bodies are smaller, making the chemical concentration higher per body weight.

What can we do about it?

As consumers, we have the ability to “vote with our dollars” by choosing to purchase products that only contain safe, natural ingredients. And what better time of year to vote with our dollars than the holidays?

Unfortunately, making an educated choice is not always as easy as it sounds, because companies are not required to disclose all the ingredients in their products on the label. For example, the ingredient “fragrance” is often a catch-all phrase for hormone-mimicking endocrine disrupting chemicals called phthalates. There are, however, a few great tools that can be found online or downloaded to your smart phone that can help you decode the confusion of product labels.

Tools for the consumer:

• Environmental Working Group (EWG) Skin Deep Database – An extensive online database of products that rates each by toxicity with 0 being safe and 10 being the most toxic. While this is a comprehensive resource, it is only online and therefore not highly portable. In addition, the EWG guidelines are so strict that very few products actually receive the designation of “safe”. I’ve attempted to find a safe product in many categories and failed to find anything with a rating below 3 that I could actually purchase in a store at an affordable cost.
• GoodGuide – Definitely my favorite because GoodGuide has both a web site and smart phone apps that allows you to scan the bar code of any product in the store for an immediate rating. In addition, GoodGuide factors in social responsibility and overall environmental responsibility of the company producing the product. I am able to quickly and easily find a  number of products in any given store that score fairly well on the GoodGuide database.
• Pick your “poison” – Do a little research on common ingredients in products and decide which ones you want to avoid; focus on avoiding those. My pet peeve is phthalates. I am flexible about other ingredients, but I absolutely will not purchase any product containing phthalates, because of the effects on fertility and hormones.
• Buy small – The more you can buy handmade products, the less likely you are to encounter industrial grade dangerous chemicals. For example, my favorite mascara and blush comes from Twink Beauty, an Etsy store. You can also follow my Dallas Moms Blog Pinterest board for more green and safe product recommendations.

Upcoming Legislation

One more thing we can do is support legislation that would hold the chemical industry responsible for more than their own profits. The Safe Chemicals Act is a law that was brought to the Senate beginning in 2010 and revisited as recently as 2012 that would replace the outdated TCSA and shift the burden of proof from the consumer to the chemical industry.

In various ways, large chemical manufacturing corporations would be more responsible for proving the safety of the chemicals they produce and include in our everyday products. This is a bill with bipartisan support, as it is something that affects us all, regardless of political affiliation.

You can click here to send a pre-formatted letter to your local representative asking that this bill be brought forward for consideration again in 2013.

In this season of giving and sharing, let’s take a minute to look forward to 2013, and make sure it’s a safer future for us all!

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