Not Too
Pretty the woman beauty products
Phthalates,
Beauty Products
In May 2002 a coalition of environmental and public health organizations contracted with a major national laboratory to test 72 name-brand, off-the-shelf beauty products for the presence of phthalates, a large family of industrial chemicals linked to permanent
birth defects in the male reproductive system. The laboratory found phthalates in nearly three-quarters of the products tested (52 of 72 products, Table 1), including nine of 14 deodorants, all 17 fragrances tested, six of seven hair gels, four of seven mousses, 14 of 18 hair sprays, and two of nine hand and body lotions (Table 2), in concentrations ranging from trace amounts to nearly three percent of the product formulation.
Major loopholes in federal law allow the $20-billion-a-year cosmetics industry to place unlimited amounts of phthalates into many personal care products with no required testing, no required monitoring of health effects, and no required labeling.
To our knowledge, the 72 product tests detailed in this study represent the most comprehensive information available on the occurrence of phthalates in individual beauty care products. None of the 52 phthalate-containing products lists the offending
chemical on its ingredient mark. In animal tests some phthalates hurt the developing testes of offspring and cause malformations of the penis and other parts of the reproductive tract. The same phthalates that cause permanent harm of the male reproductive system in laboratory studies are also found in hair spray, deodorant, and fragrances – bigname products like Revlon, Calvin Klein, Christian Dior, and
Procter & Gamble. The laboratory found phthalates in Pantene Pro V “Healthy Hold” and Aqua Net hair sprays, Arrid and Degree deodorants, and fragrances like Poison by Christian Dior and Coty’s Healing Garden Pure Joy Body Treatment, to name just a
few Chemicals that cause birth defects do not belong in products marketed to women of
childbearing age.
Not Too Pretty Phthalates, Beauty Products & the FDA the woman natural cosmetic product
Chemicals that cause birth defects do not belong in products marketed to women
of childbearing age test results indicate in all likelihood a substantial fraction of
beauty products available on store shelves contain phthalates.
Government data show that women are exposed to individual
phthalates at le vels abo ve federal safety standards
In September 2000, researchers at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that they found seven
phthalates in the bodies of 289 persons tested, and that every
person tested had a particular phthalate called dibutyl phthalate,
or DBP, in their body. The ubiquity of phthalates in the general
population surprised the scientists: “From a public health perspective,
these data provide evidence that phthalate exposure is
both higher and more common than previously suspected.”
(Blount et al 2000).
But the largest surprise came when the researchers broke the
data down by age and gender for the phthalate called DBP.