You don’t want to find fragrances in skin care products. Here’s why

We have previously talked about the risks to your health from fragrances in skin care products and a range of other personal and beauty products. Today we wanted to go into a little more depth about the health risks of fragrances.

Just to recap, there are thousands of fragrances present in so many of the personal products such as anti aging skin care products, cosmetics, soaps, shampoos, deodorants and much more that virtually all of this use on our skin every single day.

Fragrances are chemicals, normally created in a lab, and the vast majority of them have never been tested for safety for use on people. So the health risks of many are simply unknown.

And in some cases the health risks are known, including neurotoxicity which can potentially lead to brain damage.

If you browse this page at the Cosmetics Database you’ll see a range of skin care and anti aging products listed there. In fact there are hundreds or possibly even thousands listed, however they can only fit so many on the page.

On the right you’ll see a coloured circle with a number in it. The number represents the score that the Cosmetics Database assigns to that product on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 represents no perceived health hazards from the use of the product and 10 represents maximum health risk.

Of course there is some fluidity in these results, because, as is normally noted in the results, there are some gaps in the data and some other reasons why it is impossible to give a perfect result.

Notwithstanding this we wouldn’t want be using a product that has a score of 8 or above, let alone 10. In fact we wouldn’t want to use a skin care product with any number beside it at all. Data gaps or not we would prefer to err on the side of caution.

Now let’s look at one of the particular products listed there. Click on the one second from the top, namely Home Skin Lab effective Wrink’less The Wrinkle Corrector. The page you are presented with details the particular ingredients which are considered a health risk, together with a summary of the potential health risks. Here’s an image of that page.

What do you notice about the ingredients? The top listed ingredient with the highest score, marked with a red circle, is fragrance. Click on fragrance and you’ll find out more.

If you’ve read our previous page you will know that the chemical used as a fragrance is often not listed on the label. Scroll down and you will note the statement “Ingredient not fully labeled – identity unknown”.

Need we say more about the risks of fragrances in anti aging skin care products and wide range of other personal and beauty products. Anyone concerned about fragrances, or any one of dozens of other chemical ingredients found in these products should immediately start looking for alternatives.

And spend some time looking at some of the other antiaging products with a score of 10 and see how often “fragrance” is listed there.

As far as skin care products go the good news is that one small niche skin care company recognizes completely the risks of fragrances, along with many other chemical ingredients, and produces extremely high quality natural skin care products that do not contain any fragrances for this reason. They also do not contain any other chemical ingredients which may be suspect to your health.

Not only that but they work extremely well and come with a 90 day money back guarantee. You can’t ask for more than that. Read the rest of this entry

Although there’s been a lot of bad news about safe cosmetics, it’s not all bad.

We’ve written extensively about dangerous ingredients in cosmetics and skin care products, and also about the importance of using natural skin care products that don’t contain dangerous ingredients.

And we’ve highlighted some of the studies done which show such problems with cosmetics and skin care products like lead in lipsticks and phthalates in personal and beauty and body care products. And also about parabens in skin care products and cosmetics.

From time to time come good news comes along and today is such a day. The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has alerted us today that they have detected a decline in the levels of phthalates in some products. In particular they point to the perfume Poison.

They found 4 different phthalates in Poison during the last test, but this time they have tested Poison and found it to be – less poisonous. No phthalates at all. This is great news and means, it appears, that the body care and cosmetics and perfume companies are starting to take notice of the fact that the public don’t want poisonous ingredients in their cosmetics and skin care products.

It would seem obvious wouldn’t it?

But a small step is an important one nevertheless. And the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics says it isn’t confined just to Poison, but there are signs that some of the bigger companies are slowly removing poisonous ingredients like phthalates from their products this has to be good.

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