Take care with your personal products, take some simple precautions

Here on this website we have often spoken about some of the risks inherent in using skin care products and cosmetics and other personal products with various chemical components.

For instance tests have shown that many lipsticks have lead in them, and I’m sure you know how dangerous lead is for you.

33 brand-name lipsticks were tested for the presence of lead as an ingredient in the lipstick, and over half had some detectable level of lead. None of the lipsticks listed lead as an ingredient on the label.

And of course as lipstick used on the lips some amount of it goes into your body each day, either because you’ve licked your lips, or perhaps you’ve eaten food which carries a little of the lipstick on it.

Lead in your system has very serious consequences including damage to your brain, behavioural problems and a wide range of other health problems, none of them nice. Lead in your system even effects your fertility.

In fact the awareness in the community about the problems with chemical ingredients in our cosmetics and skin care products is growing, both because of the activism of various organisations such as the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and others.

And it’s also growing because of a range of publications coming on the market publicising this, such as the new book “Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry”.

However if you’re concerned about the safety of your cosmetics and skin care products there is another issue which you should consider, and it’s this that we wanted to talk about today.

Many of these products will go off. In other words they will become contaminated, often with various bacteria or with mold, and this can also be risky to your health, regardless of which chemical ingredients are used in the bottle.

In fact this has now come to the attention of the US FDA which has recently held a meeting on cosmetic microbiology safety issues, to help develop FDA guidelines on this matter in the future.

Some simple rules for the use of your cosmetics, from the MSN website, suggest that you shouldn’t share make up with anyone else, that you should be washing all the equipment used for applying your make-up reasonably regularly, such as applicators and brushes, and you should be aware that these products can go off and that you should not keep them too long.

In particular you should be very careful with any product which is used on all around your eyes. Advice from that article is that anything that goes on or near your eyes should have a shelf life at home of no longer than 3 months, after which you should throw them out and get new ones.

Of course you should also be careful with your products, following some simple commonsense rules, such as avoiding keeping them in warm places.

So it would seem that it is not just the chemical ingredients in your cosmetics and skin care products that can damage your health, you should also be concerned about the possibility of contamination of your products by such agents as bacteria or mold over time.

And of course the best way to avoid the risks of chemical contamination is to purchase safe cosmetics which do not use nasty chemicals, though of course you should be equally careful with these to make sure that they are also not contaminated over time with bacteria or mould.

Read the article on the MSN website, it makes for interesting and informative reading.

This is how you tell if a cosmetics or skin care company has a commitment to product safety.

We’ve talked elsewhere about the Campaign For Safe Cosmetics. It’s an organization set up to monitor the ingredients used in the cosmetics and skin care products and anti aging products and all those other beauty and personal care products that you, and just about everyone else, uses every day.

It’s a sad indictment that there is any need for an organization like the Campaign For Safe Cosmetics. Surely we should expect that any product that we put on or into our bodies must automatically be safe for us to use. But sadly that’s not the case, and there are many instances of products containing ingredients that are known to be hazardous to human use.

Like the lead found in many of the big brand name lipsticks recently tested. Or the new Environmental Working Group report, just a month old, finding hormone disrupting chemicals in many cosmetics and body care products, and then finding that many of our teenage girls had up to 16 of these toxic chemicals in their bodies.

So the Campaign For Safe Cosmetics has a “Compact For Safe Cosmetics” (there’s a bit of a pun there) for cosmetics, skincare and personal and beauty care product manufacturers to evidence their commitment to product safety.

How does it work? Well any company that produces a line of cosmetics or other products and is prepared to sign the Compact can do so, and by doing so it commits itself to the following:

Oh, and the European directive is basically this. Whilst the US has done very little to attempt to control the use of dangerous chemicals in cosmetics and skincare products and body care products the European Union has, and has a directive banning “the use of chemicals that are known or strongly suspected of causing cancer, mutation or birth defects.”

There are many companies that have signed the Compact For Safe Cosmetics, including Xtend Life who, we believe, make the best, and safest skin care products in the world. 

And there are also some great manufacturers of safe cosmetics.

So there are some great products that you, (and your daughter), can use with confidence. Read the rest of this entry