How To Find Out If Your Cosmetics Have Dangerous Chemicals In Them

Did you know that the average adult woman uses anywhere from ten to twenty different types of cosmetics on their face and body every day? It’s hard to believe, but take stock of what you do in the morning. If you’re like most women, you get up and then head for the shower. In the shower, you shampoo your hair, use conditioner, use a moisturizing soap or body wash, shave with shaving cream, and you may even use a facial wash. Once you get out of the shower, it’s time to put on some lotion and face moisturizer and then to start putting on your cosmetics. Even if you only put on a foundation, blush, eye shadow, and lipstick, you’ve just put on twelve different types of cosmetics. How many chemicals have you put on your body?

It’s important to remember that cosmetics are not just makeup, but are any sort of product that you put onto your body. This includes lotions, shaving creams, shampoo, conditioner, hair gel, toothpaste, sunscreen, and even nail polish and deodorant. Any type of personal care product that you use on your body, no matter whether you’re a man or a woman, it is considered to be a cosmetic.

The Skin

One thing that most people don’t stop to think about is that our skin may be the outer shell for our body, but it’s also an organ. When you put something onto your skin, it can easily find its way into the rest of your body, which means that anything that you put on the skin can be absorbed and can affect the rest of your body. That’s why you actually expose your body to chemicals when you’re performing your daily morning routine. The more cosmetics you use, the more chemicals you’re exposing yourself to, which can be a very bad thing.

There are two different types of chemicals that you can put in your body: good ones and bad ones. Head to any laboratory and you can be exposed to bad chemicals. These chemicals can instantly cause you harm or burn you, and we all know to stay away from these types of chemicals. Then you’ve got the good chemicals. These chemicals are actually chemicals that can help your body in some way, such as sunscreen. Sunscreen can protect your skin from the dangerous rays that come from the sun.  Even though good chemicals are better (i.e., not quite so bad), they can still cause harm to your body when they’re absorbed.

Studies are now showing that using unsafe chemicals that are found in cosmetics can be truly harmful to your body. When you are exposed to certain chemicals over and over again, you’re essentially giving your body a massive dose of the chemical, which is much like what would happen if you were to touch a dangerous chemical directly.  How are these companies allowed to use chemicals that are dangerous? One of the big reasons is because these manufacturers really do not have to answer to anyone. The Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA, doesn’t have a lot of laws for products that you put on your body. This means that the companies can put whatever they want into their products, and they opt to use chemicals that will make the chemicals look better or smell better without stopping to think about what the chemicals will do, when exposed over the long term, to their customers.

Finding Safe Cosmetics

While you may wish that you could just stop using any form of cosmetic, think about how we’d all look if we did. It’s unreasonable to ask everyone to stop using cosmetics completely, but you can try to help people, and yourself, to use cosmetics that do not have bad chemicals in them. So how do you choose the right products? The best way is to determine what chemicals are actually dangerous and then to simply read the label on the cosmetic. There are a number of websites devoted to talking about bad chemicals that you can find in cosmetics, and you can even print out a small list of them to take with you to the store. In this way, you don’t have to memorize all of the chemicals, but can instead refer to the list. A few quick chemicals to avoid are: butyl acetate, ethyl acetate, petrolateum, formaldehyde, parabens, talc, and propylene glycol. You’ll find a number of these chemicals in things that you likely already have in your home, such as deodorant. Take a good, long look at any ingredient list before you purchase cosmetics to make sure that they don’t have any of the dangerous chemicals in them, so that you can protect your skin and your body from being exposed to them if you can possibly avoid it.