This week there was an OpEd piece in the New York Times about the fact that the chemicals in personal care products are not tested for safety and that babies are born with a lot of chemicals already in their blood. My parents were chemists so this is not news to me, but if you thought that the stuff in shampoo or lotion or other personal care products had been somehow tested for safety in a thorough way, allow me to cut to the punchline.
It hasn’t.
Heck they put formaldehyde precursors in certain baby shampoo as a preservative (it doesn’t say formaldehyde because it only becomes formaldehyde when water is added). Even more concerning, the Unites States allows personal care products to contain ingredients banned in the EU and Japan. So not only do we not check to see if they are safe, but even after we have evidence that they may not be safe, these products stay on shelves and continue to be manufactured and sold.
So what is a concerned shopper to do?
There are two websites you can visit to find out if your personal care products contain ingredients suspected of causing cancer or banned in other countries. They are called The Good Guide and The Environmental Working Group. Both explain why they rate products the way that they do.
You can find The Good Guide here
http://www.goodguide.com/
And the EWG lists are here
http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/
The lists are different and they rate products differently but if you want to find the safest sunscreen, both sites tell you why they recommend what they recommend so you can make your own informed decision.
If you are interested in the original NYT Op Ed piece about chemical testing you can find that here
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sunday-review/think-those-chemicals-have-been-tested.html?ref=opinion&_r=0
And then of course there are the cleaning products….
