Will the U.S. Catch Up with Europe in Regulating Unsafe Skin Care Ingredients?

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Given the health implications of prolonged exposure or overexposure to certain ingredients in commercial cosmetic and personal care products, you would think that most companies would at a minimum, be willing to re-formulate some of their worst offenders. You would think …

Unfortunately, the U.S. lags far behind Europe in this respect. In fact, the European Union did an exhaustive review and revision of its cosmetic regulatory requirements in 2003 and placed an outright ban on certain ingredients that, based on a growing body of evidence, were identified as potentially harmful to pregnant women and their babies. Some of those ingredients include phthalates (used as solvents to soften plastics, they are the hidden danger in “fragrances”), Bisphenol-A (this is the BPA that is found in certain types of plastics used to make water bottles and baby bottles among other things), and Dioxane.

As a result of those regulatory changes, many U.S. cosmetic and personal care companies selling in the European market were forced to re-formulate some of their products to meet the new, stricter requirements. The rub? Rather than re-formulate these products for all the markets they serve, they chose to re-formulate just those products that were sold in the EU. In other words, the same products marketed here were not re-formulated! I’m not naming any names here, but these are companies with widely established brands here in the U.S.

If that’s not enough to give one pause, I don’t know what is. I think the lesson here is if you can no longer rely on companies to “do the right thing” by their customers, then you only have yourself as the last line of defense. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. With a little education, anyone can learn to decipher ingredient labels and product claims and find the right combination of products to suit their needs without sacrificing their health or the health of the environment.