Skin Deep

I strive to eradicate chemicals from my life wherever and whenever possible. I am not necessarily chemically sensitive, just chemically neurotic. I just don’t like them. I don’t like them on my food, in my home, on my person, or on the persons of those I love. One of the last and most important areas I eradicated chemicals (or so I thought) was from my personal care products. When the idea hit me that anything coming into contact with my body could eventually be absorbed into it, I began purchasing natural organic products from my local natural grocer with the working assumption that ‘natural’ plus ‘organic’ equals ‘safe’. I thought this safety assumption was, well, safe. 

Three years ago I stumbled across an article on personal care product safety. I almost skipped reading it entirely, after all I was not their target audience--I used only natural, organic products purchased from my natural grocer. But I kept reading anyway and was soon shocked to discover that there is virtually no federal safety oversight regarding what ingredients companies put into any product used on the body, even though almost anything placed on the skin can and will enter the body, sometimes more effectively than had one eaten it. Moreover, companies are free to use almost any ingredient they choose and they don’t even have to reveal what it is in an effort to protect their ‘trade secrets’. A seemingly benign ingredient listed as “fragrance” could be a known carcinogen, endocrine disruptor, or neurotoxin--yet no one outside those manufacturing it will ever know what is really in that particular fragrance. And those organic, natural products I was shoveling out good money for at my natural grocer? A few of them were chock full of known carcinogens, disruptors, and neurotoxins.  

That’s the bad news. Now the good news:  Environmental Working Group (EWG) is working hard to keep all of us informed and protected from these potentially dangerous ingredients. Founded in 1993, EWG is a nonprofit organization with the stated mission “to use the power of public information to protect public health and the environment.” They also advocate for national policy changes through their Action Fund organization. In 2004, EWG launched their Skin Deep database, an online safety guide for personal care products and cosmetics. The database rates each of its nearly 43,000 products (with new ones added regularly) on a hazard scale of 1 to 10.  If they don’t list a particular product you are looking for, you can look up the individual ingredients to see each of their ratings.  I LOVE this database. The minute I read about it, I was up until the wee hours checking each of my products and finding out which ones were keepers and which were permanently evicted from my bathroom shelves. After finishing my initial research, I printed out their recommended shopping list of the safest products and went on a shopping spree, this time around armed with knowledge instead of blind trust in the words, ‘natural’ and ‘organic’. 

The Skin Deep database relies on tons of chemical research conducted by a wide variety of sources and it is important to note that some of the ingredients are dangerous only when used in a certain way or used in certain quantities, so the question as to a particular chemical’s genuine toxicity in any given situation  may require more information than may be provided by the database. Everyone has to assess their own comfort levels and do the background research on each potentially hazardous chemical should more in-depth information be desired. As a chemically neurotic individual, any product that is not a ‘0’ or, at the very most a ‘1’, is too hazardous for me. I figure that there are more than enough chemicals I come into contact with involuntarily every day to willingly invite more of them into my body. I’d rather just honor my neurosis and shovel out good money on those products where ‘organic’ plus ‘natural’ also equals ‘safe’. 

Peace,

Annie

Comments

[joe elliott]

this is awesome. thank you so much. going to bookmark it.