snake oil, revisited

[anotheranon]

From L., who knows more about this sort of thing than I:

A slightly less fun link: the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep personal product safety report. Turns out a lot of the snake oil isn't just ineffective, it's bad for you - but the FDA signs off on it anyway.

Unsure whether this will change my makeup/lotion/etc. habits or not. MAC shows up nowhere on the "avoid" or "recommended" lists, so my inner MACattacker says not to worry too much ;)

Having said this, some of the cautions about eye care and eye makeup ingredients give me pause. I never like to take chances with my eyesight. Next time I get mascara, for example, I'm going to look at this list first.

Comments

[nminusone.livejournal.com]

I've been looking through the EWG link and I'd like to see a few things.

Better differentiation between ingredients with well-known problems vs. ingredients that seem safe but which lack formal proof of safety.

For ingredients which are not formally tested for use in cosmetics, some distinction between those with a long history of detailed study and safe use as supplements (e.g. lecithin) and those which are not well studied and/or have little history or bad history.

Better evaluation of the likely risks. For instance they list several forms of vitamin E as a carcinogen. My ass it is. Other ingredients they list are real problem issues, but the site doesn't show the distinction at all.

It'd also be nice to have some breakdown of allergic reactions. This is difficult, but not every potential allergen is equal. It would be nice to have them report on which ingredients often cause problems vs. which ingredients only do so rarely.

They're also entirely too paranoid about ingredients like glycerin, which the body manufactures quite a bit of from food, and which does have a long history of very safe use as a supplement.

In some ways the site seems like it was put together by liability lawyers for the cosmetic companies. It seems to say "Hey, this could kill you! You've been warned - don't even try to sue!" for every last ingredient.

Basically, when you cry wolf, you lose credibility. When you fail to distinguish between small risks and large risks, you lose credibility. It's like if I implied that driving to work was as deadly as drinking a quart of lye. It's just BS, and everyone knows it.

I think companies should have a strong incentive to use safer and better ingredients, and I think that getting this sort of information out to consumers is a key part of that. People need to be able to find out which products to avoid, through the chemical alphabet soup on the label. But I know from experience that if you tell people that *everything* is gonna kill them, they give up caring and just get on with life. I'd much rather see them focus on the top 10 or 20 or 50 ingredients to avoid, based on which ones truly cause the most problems, or which are the most suspicious. As it is there are LOTS of ingredients in there which have long histories of safe use but which are still lumped in with some nasty shit, with no distinctions drawn between them. As a result I think the site gives off a Chicken Little vibe, and I fear that can only hurt their message.


Your own point about checking out your eye makeup is a good example of what I'm saying. Eyes are known to be more fragile than most skin areas, and losing your eyesight would probably be way worse than most types of skin damage that are at all common. So it makes good sense to be more careful with products that will go in or near your eyes. I'd just like that site to show a similar, graduated evaluation of the relative risks of each ingredient, in context.