Natural Skin Care Blog

If there are dangerous ingredients in skin care products shouldn’t the FDA act?

I’ve talked before about some of the dangerous ingredients in skin care products and cosmetics in general. Read more about Natural Skin Care and dangerous ingredients. This article isn’t to talk about that.

This time I’m going to talk about what is done about dangerous ingredients in skin care products. Because there seems little doubt that there are suspect for even dangerous cosmetic ingredients in our cosmetics and skin care products.

I want to refer you to 2 sources that seem pretty unequivocal about this, and show pretty clearly that the FDA does not regulate the cosmetics and skin care and anti aging industries.

The first one is directly from the FDA website. It seems clear that the FDA regulates a “drug” but doesn’t regulate a “cosmetic”. Here’s a quote directly from their website:

“The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act defines drugs as those products that cure, treat, mitigate or prevent disease or that affect the structure or function of the human body. While drugs are subject to a review and approval process by FDA, cosmetics are not approved by FDA prior to sale.”

That seems pretty clear doesn’t it? If it’s a cosmetic it isn’t regulated by the FDA.

So if it isn’t regulated then if there are dangerous ingredients in skin care products and cosmetics and also anti aging products the FDA doesn’t do anything about it.

Here’s another quote from the FDA:

“FDA does not have a premarket approval system for cosmetic products or ingredients”.

Hmmmmm!

How about this. A quote from the Cosmetic Safety Database:

“Due to gaping loopholes in federal law, companies can put virtually any ingredient into personal care products. Even worse, the government does not require pre-market safety tests for any of them.”

Hmmmmm again!

So if the cosmetics and anti aging industry is unregulated, it’s up to the industry to regulate itself. To stop itself from putting dangerous or suspect ingredients in skin care products and cosmetics, even if it will make more money doing so.

Do you believe that big business will self regulate to avoid harming their customers where there is lots of money to be made? I don’t.

Just look at the tobacco industry. They’ve been killing their own customers for profit for decades, and lying about it too.So I thought I’d just tell you a little more about why you should be suspect about your skin care products.

Not all of them. There are excellent and safe natural skin care products, you just won’t have heard of the company that makes them, and you won’t find them on the shelves of your local drugstore either. Read the rest of this entry

You need ingredients that are researched by people with a little lateral thinking.

Have a look on the label of your current skin care products. Can you see Cupuacu listed there?

No? I thought not. You see there are a range of ingredients that the mainstream skincare companies use in their products. A relatively restricted range that doesn’t include many great ingredients that are known for their skin health qualities. Capuacu isn’t one of them.

The well known brand name companies use ingredients that have some things in common. They’re well known. That’s good (for them) because if people see something like Coenzyme Q10 on the bottle they know it, so they figure that it has to be good because they know it, so they buy it.

But the mere fact that it’s there doesn’t mean it does anything. For example, how much is there? Is it there only in token amounts so that it can be listed on the label? And is it there in a form that can be taken up and used by the skin?

Great skin care products need to be put together by people who care about how well the product works, not how much of what goes into it to make sure it sells to the max. Great skin care products are put together by people who like to find great organic and natural ingredients that really work, to put into the product.

Even if putting it on the label isn’t going to make it sell. That’s Cupuacu.

No-one’s heard of it, but the best skin care products use it as an ingredient.

What is Cupuacu? It comes from the Cupuacu tree, sometimes called the Cupuassu or Copoasu. A tree related to cocoa. Cupuacu has various health benefits, and is packed with antioxidants, but in particular is great for your skin. Read the rest of this entry