cosmetics
kkrisberg | December 4, 2015Take a quick look around your home and chances are you’ll find at least one product with an ingredient simply described as “fragrance.” But what exactly does that mean and is there anything harmful in the ubiquitous chemical cocktails we refer to as fragrance? Maybe. But the real answer is that it’s hard to know for sure — and that, say advocates, is bad for public health.
“The problem with fragrance is a systemic one,” Alexandra Scranton, director of science and research at Women’s Voices for the Earth (WVE), told me. “It’s a black box of an industry.”
Scranton is the author of a new report…
kkrisberg | November 12, 2014Decreased lung function, breast cancer, miscarriage, depression and neurological disease. These are just a few of the health and disease risks that salon workers disproportionately face while on the job, according to a new report on the impact of toxic chemicals within the beauty and personal care industry.
Yesterday, Women’s Voices for the Earth, a nonprofit working to eliminate toxic chemicals from workplaces, homes and communities, released “Beauty and Its Beast: Unmasking the Impact of Toxic Chemicals on Salon Workers,” which highlights decades of research on beauty care workers and…
egrossman | April 11, 2012By Elizabeth Grossman
While the US Supreme Court was debating the Affordable Care Act, the US House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee Health Subcommittee held a hearing to examine the current federal oversight of cosmetics and personal care product safety. The hearing revealed that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the federal agency that oversees the more than eight billion such products now sold annually in the US, knows astonishingly little about these products' ingredients. This data gap - perhaps better described as a data chasm - is compounded by the inadequacy…
cagapakis | July 22, 2010GOOD has an interesting series of articles called No More Dirty Looks about the cosmetics that we use every day and what options are available for safer, more environmentally sound beauty products, without any toxic carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, or petrochemicals. Yesterday they linked to a terrifying video from The Story of Stuff Project describing the limits of regulation on toxic chemicals used in everyday products from lipstick to baby shampoo:
The best line of the video I think comes in about halfway through, when talking about hair relaxers and skin whiteners advertised to young…