Beauty Secrets

Beauty may be only skin deep, but the products we use to attain it contain chemicals that can penetrate far deeper. The average adult uses nine personal care products a day, with roughly 120 chemicals spread among them. While the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires listing most ingredients on labels, it does not conduct safety tests on those ingredients. Some of the chemicals have been tested and deemed “generally recognized as safe” by the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR), an industry-funded organization, but other, independent studies have raised concerns. The ingredients listed below are best avoided altogether; use safer alternatives instead.