Chemicals To Avoid In Personal Care Products [Week 38]

Posted On April 18, 2022

When you’re shopping for personal care products, you want the item you bought to work and be healthy for you and the planet. There’s a lot of hype about which ingredients are harmful to your body, so let’s start to find some resources to make good choices.

Amanda Drews

Companies would never be allowed to add dangerous chemicals to our personal care products…right? Like legally?

Guess again.

According to the Harvard School of Public Health, “Under a law that has not been updated since 1938, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has little power to regulate the ingredients in personal care products. Even known offenders such as formaldehyde, triclosan, and phthalates are still legally permissible in product formulations. Companies are allowed to label their products organic, natural, or hospital-approved based on their own interpretation of the terms.” Some of those ingredients can also be listed as “fragrance” if the company wants to hide them as part of proprietary formulations.

Take a look at the labels on everything you put on your body in a week. How many ingredients are there total? Are they mostly things you’ve heard of or have no clue where they come from or what they do? How many of them can you even pronouce? I gave up after counting 200 ingredients on my personal products I use in the average week!

However, we also can’t assume that just because we don’t know what an ingredient is, that it’s going to hurt us. So let’s dive into the messy world of the ingredients found in our personal care products.

Greenwashing?

Does the above label look familiar? Many products have labels on them that list a bunch of ingredients that the product doesn’t contain. Is this just a greenwashing trend or are these products actually good for us? Well, it could be either. Or both. I guess if large companies want to make healthier products to meet the demand of consumers, that’s a move in a better direction. Ideally, I would like to find a company that makes only healthy personal products.

One clue that a company may be greenwashing a product, is if it lists ingredients that have already been banned for a while. Labels on a product that say “CFC-free” don’t hold much weight as CFC’s were banned for the most part in the 1980’s. Or if something is BPA free, what is the BPA being replaced with? BPS and BPF? Those don’t seem to be much better for us according to The Journal of the Endocrine Study. Whenever you see claims on a product, think to yourself if it was necessary or what those ingredients that are missing are being substituted with.

You can read more about signs of greenwashing here at the beginning of my 52 week challenge.

Not all “chemicals” are bad

Labeling products as “chemical-free” is another form of greenwashing. First of all, that product does indeed contain chemicals and not all chemicals are bad. Let me repeat that again. Not all chemicals are bad! Matter is made of chemicals. Your food, the water you drink, and your body itself are all beautiful cocktails of chemicals working together to sustain life. Those “chemical-free” labels are typically meant to indicate there is nothing synthetic added but not all synthetic chemicals are bad either.

There are some natural compounds we have synthetically replicated, such as the anti-cancer drug Taxol ( BBC’s Science Focus) or vanilla. Using synthetically made versions puts less strain on the natural resources they are derived from. And just remember that not all natural compounds are good for you! The NIH points out that mercury and snake venom are two chemicals found in nature that are very much bad for you.

Chemicals become bad when the dosage reaches toxic levels. For some chemicals, such as lead, that dose may only need to be small to be toxic. For others, like water or the cyanide from many crushed apple seeds, it would need to be a large amount very quickly to be harmful. Some chemicals become more harmful when combined with others or used in a different way than what is recommended.

The bottom line is, there are chemicals everywhere! We just need to educate ourselves on what we should be looking out for in the products we buy and the ways we use those products.

Resources for finding good products

There are some third party certifications you can look for when shopping for healthy personal care products that are eco-friendly and healthy for you.

• Green Seal– The mission of Green Seal is “to encourage market transformation away from products made with toxic ingredients and resource-intensive practices and toward safer, greener products supported by safer, greener supply chains.”
• EcoLabel Certified– UL’s SPOT Database is a program run by the Canadian government and offers a product database search.
• Greener Choices– Consumer Reports offers some good articles explaining certifications and what they mean

So what is it that we have to look out for?

The Campaign For Safe Cosmetics has a list of Chemicals of Concern where you can search by health issue, product type and person of concern. Some stores and companies, such as Target and BeautyCounter, have lists of chemicals they won’t use in their Clean Product Lines or in any of their products at all.

Here is a collective list of chemicals to avoid in our personal products (taken from the lists above):

1. Look at the labels of the products you are considering purchasing. Does it appear to have any hints of greenwashing? Does this product have any certifications? Do a quick Google search to see what the company says about sustainability.
2. Follow along as we look at specific personal care products and their ingredients.