Green Your Beauty

By Rosemary Carstens, Published:01/01/2006

We live in a culture that reveres youth and beauty, so it should come as no surprise that we are especially vulnerable to ads promising that their products will keep us forever young, forever desirable. But some of those promises are like Sleeping Beauty’s poisoned apple—irresistible on the outside, but deadly within.

An estimated 100,000 synthetic chemicals are currently registered for use in the US, and fewer than 10 percent of them have been tested for their effects on human health. At the same time that an increasingly high number of these chemicals have found their way into cosmetics, personal care products, and our environment, breast cancer incidence has risen dramatically—from a lifetime risk of one in 20 in the 1960s to one in seven today. “It is unacceptable that cosmetic companies continue to use ingredients that are breast carcinogens, as well as other toxic chemicals, in their products,” says Jeanne Rizzo, RN, executive director of the Breast Cancer Fund in San Francisco. “We call on the cosmetics industry to phase out their use of these harmful ingredients.”

The American Cancer Society projects 211,240 new cases of invasive breast cancer among women in the US in 2005 alone, and 40,870 breast cancer deaths, 99.9 percent of them in women. The majority of breast cancer incidents cannot be explained by hereditary factors, and new studies have put scientists on high alert about the effects of constant exposure to an array of harmful chemicals over time. Long-term exposure to even very tiny doses, whether ingested, inhaled, or absorbed through the skin, can prove potentially dangerous.  continue reading

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