What's In Your Personal Care Products?

August 3, 2010

Interview with Alexandra Spunt, author of the book No More Dirty Looks: The Truth about Your Beauty Products--and the Ultimate Guide to Safe and Clean Cosmetics

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Mike Carruthers:
When it comes to cosmetics and the personal care products you buy, you assume the ingredients are safe and they may be, but…

Alexandra Spunt:
Essentially the cosmetics industry is what you call self regulated. So no one’s really checking up on these things.
 

Alexandra Spunt, author of the book No More Dirty Looks, says whatever it is you put on your body can get into your body through the skin so you should be aware of the ingredients in the products you use. For instance some products contain lead.

Lipstick has lead in it. And this was actually a study done by the FDA and of all of the lipsticks they tested they all had lead in it.

And fragrances whether as perfume or in other products can be a little tricky…

The fragrance industry functions in a similar way to the cosmetics industry expect they’re protected under trade secret law. So the people who formulate the fragrances do not reveal what goes into those formulations. If you read your label it’ll just say fragrance but that word actually represents 20, 30, 40 other chemicals that aren’t identified.

If you want to know how safe your cosmetics or personal care products are…

There’s a cosmetics database online and it’s an amazing resource where you can enter in a products name and it’ll show you what’s in that product and also give you a safety rating on it - Its just cosmeticsdatabase.com.
 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here