Toxin Awareness

Because it's for sale in stores doesn't make it safe

Now let's talk about cosmetics, lotions and hair-care products. Certainly these items are safe. Once again, the evidence raises concerns. "Cancer and health risk experts just concluded reviews that indicate mainstream cosmetics and personal hygiene products pose the highest cancer risk exposures to the general public, higher than smoking."

After cosmetologists complained of headaches, loss of balance, memory loss, asthma, nervous system damage and respiratory damage in a 1978 government hearing on the safety of cosmetics, a House sub-committee called for the analysis of nearly 3,000 chemicals used in cosmetics.

The results were disturbing. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) studied 2,983 ingredients and found 884 to be toxic. Of the 884 toxic ingredients, biological mutations could be caused by 314, reproductive problems by 218, acute toxicity by 778, cancer tumors by 146 and skin and eye irritation by 376.

Easily Recognizable Petrochemicals

Mineral Oil - Petrolatum - Petroleum 
Artificial Dyes - Artificial Colors - Artificial Fragrances

ABOUT MINERAL OIL

Most skin care and personal hygiene products have a common ingredient - mineral oil. and mineral oil is toxic to the human body. After all, mineral oil, or non-renewable crude oil, is the same substance that kills marine life after an oil spill in the ocean. Mineral oil molecules are too large to penetrate the water after a spill so they stay on the surface, coating it and forming a barrier. It's the same with human skin. Mineral oil blocks all nutrients that might be in a product, and it offers no nutritional value in return. It actually draws any nutrients the skin might have away?

No matter how high the quality of mineral oil a company claims to make, there is no such thing as good mineral oil. These oils are hydrogenated. Hydrogenation basically plasticizes the oils, making them act like plastic in and on the human skin. Then the plastic coating keeps the skin from effectively eliminating toxins and regulation temperature.

Often, these derivatives of nonrenewable crude oil, like mineral oil, are not found in nature, and the human body doesn't know what to do with them. All kinds of side effects varying in degree can then be expected. The more common symptoms are fatigue, memory loss, personality changes, headaches, sleep disturbances and sexual dysfunction. Even worse, many of the same oils that cause these symptoms are also known to cause cancer.

Many lubricants, cosmetics, waxes and soaps are also made with animal renderings. When an animal dies, whether it is a cow ravaged by disease, the remains after it is slaughtered road kill, a goat or a sheep or a cat or a dog euthanized by the city, it is sent to a rendering plant to be disposed of. There, the animals-bones, blood, hooves, horns, heads, intestines and all-are dumped in huge grinders, mixed together and steam-cooked. Then the fatty substance that floats to the top is scraped off and used to make these common household products.

Disgusted? How could the fatty leftovers of dead, diseased and euthanized animals possibly be good for you?

Get it off the shelves! 

Clearly, the Food and Drug Administration isn't moving fast enough to keep us protected. In fact, the FDA isn't even required to test cosmetics for safety before they are sold. The FDA can only remove a cosmetic from the market after enough complaints have been registered and enough evidence has been collected to prove the product is harmful.

Alarmingly still, the cosmetics and toiletries industry makes $36.4 billion a year. And in 1999 the Cosmetics Office, which deals with this industry and functions under the FDA, had its funding cut by 50 percent, reducing its staff from 27 to 15 people. This cut included secretaries and clerks. It formed the suspension of the Cosmetics Voluntary Registration Program. This means makers of cosmetics no longer have any place to report the ingredients they are using. The cuts also meant there is virtually no place to go for questions about products, ingredients and safety issues because there aren't enough people to make that happen. Laboratory studies have also been reduced or suspended.
The cosmetic industry has become so big, and in many cases the products so powerful, that the cosmetics industry has begun to use the word "cosmeceutical" to refer to products that have drug-like effects. And many products do have powerful, yet unregulated and untested, ingredients. These kinds of ingredients are commonly found in skin peelers, skin lighteners and darkeners, emollients and so forth. If a product changes the structure of the skin, then it is a drug, and one that hasn't been tested for side effects, long-term effects and so forth.
Therefore the consumer needs to be looking out for himself and understand ingredients and their effects, because there is no one else doing it.