In my last post I mentioned 2 things you can do right away to eliminate or reduce your exposure to toxins in your personal care products. I emphasized the importance of learning to read and understand ingredient panels and label claims. Today I want to focus on how you can become a little more savvy when it comes to distinguishing between products that claim to be natural and ones that really are so you can quickly start to replace some of those toxic products you’re using with safer ones.
There’s no magic bullet here … just clues and the work that others have done to help make it a little easier. If you’ve already started using “natural” products but aren’t sure how natural they really are, here’s a quick way you can tell. Natural personal care products are those whose primary ingredients are plant-based. Truly natural products are ones whose primary ingredients are not combined with synthetic or petroleum ingredients, additives, fillers, or that insidious term “fragrance.”
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) researched and reviewed all publicly available information on the ingredients listed under the products in their database and used the information to rank products on a scale of 1-10 for safety concerns based on their analyses. It is by no means a complete or exhaustive database, and its ranking system errs on the side of overstating potential health concerns by relying heavily on the stated hazards in the Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) of individual ingredients.
These safety reports look at the worst possible scenario that can result from repeated or even one-time exposure to the ingredient in very high amounts or under very specific circumstances. For example, an ingredient that comes in powdered form may pose a very high safety risk if inhaled but when diluted in liquid may not pose the same threat. If EWG identified it as a potential hazard in one circumstance it is flagged as hazardous regardless of how it appears in the finished product. The assumption is that if it’s dangerous to inhale in large quantities, then it is dangerous to absorb into the skin even in very tiny amounts –which may or may not be true. Their point is we don’t have enough data to know for sure.
Nevertheless, Skin Deep does offer a helpful guideline for comparing the relative safety of different products and brands and provides an opportunity to find new products that might not be readily available in the commercial mainstream. Generally you’ll find that products with higher safety concern rankings tend to contain a lot of questionable ingredients, so look at a product’s overall rating and then look at the ratings for the individual ingredients in that product and you should be able to tell if the overall rating is a little skewed due to one or two ingredients ranking higher than all the others.
You can also use the Teens Turning Green Dirty Thirty List as a handy cheat sheet to help you quickly identify and eliminate the worst of these ingredients from your life right now.
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