Are Cosmetics Really Clean?
“There’s no such thing as a safe cosmetic,” I was told when I first started learning about natural beauty. It’s because you cannot have color without the likelihood of heavy metal contamination.
You may have heard that most lipsticks contain lead. No, it’s not added as an ingredient, but is a contaminant of the colorant. Other common heavy metals in your makeup are cadmium and mercury.
Safety is built on transparency, so let’s pull back the curtain to see if your color cosmetics are really clean?
How do heavy metals end up in color cosmetics in the first place?
According to Beautycounter:
“Heavy metals like lead, cadmium, and mercury are not intentionally added to beauty products. These metals are often present in raw materials and naturally mined colors that eventually become ingredients in color cosmetics. In other words, they make their way into products by tagging along with other ingredients as contaminants.
Just like gold, heavy metals are distributed throughout the ground in highly variable and often unpredictable ways. That makes it pretty difficult to know where they will be found and in what concentrations (so it’s not as simple as finding a “clean” source, unfortunately). So, when other ingredients like colors are mined, unwanted heavy metals may be inadvertently pulled from the earth as well. This means that using only naturally derived colors doesn’t necessarily mean a product is inherently safer. “
Are heavy metals the only ingredient of concern in cosmetics?
Unfortunately there are hundreds of ingredients of concern. Of the more than 10,000 chemicals used to formulate cosmetics, just 11 have ever been banned or restricted by the federal Food and Drug Administration.
Two big victories this summer will change the course of cosmetics in years to come, starting in California with the Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act (banning the use of an additional 12 ingredients in personal-care products sold in the state of California) and the Safer Fragrance bill (takes a significant step towards closing the “fragrance loophole” which allows companies to keep their fragrance ingredients a secret).
This legislation will spur product innovation across the country. This is how the clean beauty movement works (education + advocacy + product).
What does safety look like with cosmetics?
Rigorous screening, transparency, and product innovation is the only way to ensure safety. Screening makeup for heavy metals is a practice that every beauty brand should be doing, but is not widely practiced, even within the 'clean' beauty industry.
How is Beautycounter different?
The higher the pigment and color payoff, the higher chance there is for heavy metal contamination. Therefore, Beautycounter goes beyond their Never List of 1800 ingredients they’ll never use and also screens each colorant for 23 health and environmental endpoints. This is in addition to testing raw materials and finished goods for heavy metals.
Beautycounter tests for heavy metals at concentrations ten times lower than what is standard practice in the beauty industry (1 part per billion vs 10 parts per million).
Beautycounter constantly advocates for more health protective laws, including the two bills this summer: Toxic-Free Cosmetics Act and Safer Fragrance Bill.
Beautycounter is eliminating talc from it’s products (just 5 currently contain talc) by 2021. Although they only use talc tested for asbestos-contamination (the main concern), the response is for consumers concerned with the general lack of safety testing from the FDA. More on what eliminating talc means for Beautycounter’s cosmetics here.
You can learn more about Beautycounter’s take on clean beauty here.
Shop Beautycounter’s cosmetics here.