The Ugly Side of Pretty

"I don't pay much attention to the ingredient lists, I just know what works for me," said Shelley Carpenter, when asked what she looks for in her personal care products. Thinking a little harder, she adds, "I'm allergic to most perfumes, so I stay away from smelly stuff. But I couldn't pin it down." This begs the question, "Who can?" After all, how many of us have the time or inclination to scour the ingredient lists of our moisturizer, deodorant, body lotion and any of the other products we slather on daily?

Carpenter, 45, bases her choices of personal body care products primarily on how her skin immediately reacts to them, and second to that, their functionality. Her skin, beautifully clear and alabaster, erupts into a red, scaly rash at the slightest provocation and she's aware from years of trial and error that certain products set this in motion.

But beyond skin eruptions and rashes, emerging science suggests that untold numbers of cosmetics and personal care ingredients may be silently and insidiously promoting cancer, ravaging women's reproductive functions and causing birth defects. Known by hundreds of long, intimidating chemical names, these ingredients are in the products we shower and bathe with, rub, spray and dab on our bodies, unconsciously, day-in-and-day-out.

It's the day-in-and-day-out part that's of most concern, since these toxic ingredients leak their poisons through our porous skin and into our bodies bit-by-bit. "There's not one smoking gun that we can point to and say 'it's that personal care product, that deodorant, that nail polish that is going to give you cancer," said Jeanne Rizzo, the executive director of the San Francisco-based Breast Cancer Fund. "We can say the cumulative exposure -- the aggregate exposure that we all have to a myriad of personal care products containing carcinogens, mutagens and reproductive toxins, has not been assessed."

Categorically, the giant, mainstream personal care products companies continue to use known or suspected toxic ingredients in their product formulas. There are literally thousands of substances that have been used for decades without the slightest hint to consumers that they may be doing something more than making us squeaky clean and smell good. As activist Charlotte Brody points out, "Neither cosmetic products nor cosmetic ingredients are reviewed or approved by the Food and Drug Administration before they are sold to the public. And the FDA cannot require companies to do safety testing of their cosmetic products before marketing."

Hence, chemicals such as acrylamide (in foundation, face lotion and hand cream) linked to mammary tumors in lab research; formaldehyde (found in nail polish and blush) classified as a probable human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency; and dibutyl phthalate (an industrial chemical commonly found in perfume and hair spray) known to damage the liver, kidney and reproductive systems, disrupt hormonal processes and increase breast cancer risk, are widely used in beauty products.

So should Shelley Carpenter be aware of this? She's certainly no slouch. She's a clinical hospital pharmacist advising doctors on the complex nuances of drug therapies; she's also working on her doctorate in pharmacy while being a mom and wife. Point is, like most of us, she's over-extended and assumes -- like most of us, that whatever personal care products we casually grab off the store shelf must be OK or, well, they wouldn't be sold. In other words, we think, "There's somebody watching out for us, probably some government agency."

"The public, bless our little democratic good government hearts, believes that there is some federal agency that makes sure that dangerous chemicals aren't put into the products we put all over ourselves. Sadly, it's just not true," quips Brody, who's executive director of Commonweal. It, along with Rizzo's Breast Cancer Fund and dozens of other social profit groups, are waging the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. They're banging the drum to rouse consumers from our slumber of ignorance to realize the dangers lurking in personal care products and the failure -- or refusal -- of any power to change it.