Protect Yourself From Personal-Care Products

When I shopped in olden times—which in my mind means about a year ago, before I learned about all the toxins in my familiar lotions and potions—I pondered whether the cosmetics and personal-care products I chose actually did anything. Would my brand of sunscreen stay on when I swam, and would it really prevent sunburn? Would my deodorant eclipse any locker-room essence at the end of a tough day? Would the products really make my hair glossy, my teeth sparkly, my breath minty-fresh—and at a price I could afford?

It turns out I was worrying about the wrong things. What I should have been asking is this: Are these products safe? Amazingly, the majority of them are not. Most personal-care products and cosmetics contain some pretty nasty ingredients, according to studies conducted over the last decade by some fairly august institutions, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the equivalent Canadian health agencies, nonprofit watchdog groups, and many research universities in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

What did these studies turned up? For one, many kinds of perfume and aftershave contain benzene, designated a human carcinogen by the National Institutes of Health. The Canadian government registers 1,800 brands of cosmetics that contain triclosan, an anti-bacterial agent that has been shown to interfere with thyroid function in lab animals.

Researchers have even found lead, a neurotoxin and heavy metal which the EPA deems unsafe at any level. In what product did toxicologists find lead? Lipstick, of which the average woman eats approximately four pounds in her lifetime. In one-third of 33 brands of lipstick analyzed, an independent testing laboratory found lead levels that exceed the FDA's allowable lead levels for candy. The reddest lipsticks tended to have the most lead.

Perhaps the most disturbing industrial chemicals that researchers are finding in makeup bags and on bathroom shelves are ones called "endocrine disruptors." Endocrine-disrupting chemicals are found in soap, shampoo, styling creams and hairspray, sunscreen, moisturizer, toothpaste, scent, you name it. In our bodies, these chemicals behave like artificial hormones.

Even very low doses of tricky little endocrine-disrupting molecules are enough to sabotage the all-important networks that choreograph our nervous and immune-system function, organ and tissue health, insulin production, metabolism, intelligence, behavior, and sexuality throughout our lives and into our old age. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals can mimic estrogen, block testosterone, and sideline the thyroid hormones that keep our neurons connected.

Particularly worrisome is just how little of some substances it takes to scramble our internal workings. While we could once take comfort in the maxim, "Dose Makes the Poison"—which meant, "there are very low levels at which even the most dangerous poisons are safe"—we know now that ultra-low levels of endocrine-disrupting and neurotoxic chemicals can have powerful effects, garbling vital chemical messages in our bodies.

Says geneticist Pat Hunt, the Meyer Distinguished Professor at the Washington State University School of Molecular Biosciences, "Our bodies are designed to be exquisitely sensitive to our own hormones, after all." With powerful new methods for detecting the presence of infinitesimal amounts of synthetic chemicals, Hunt says, "In my laboratory, we're documenting adverse reactions to estrogen mimickers at levels so low we wouldn't even have known those artificial hormones were present in the samples a dozen years ago."