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CHAPTER 1
History's Beauty Industry Influences
"What's past is prologue," as William Shakespeare wrote, which is one reason why the history of cosmetics and personal-care products may hold clues to how and why they became the collection of concealed chemical dangers we know today.
Credit often goes to the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt, Cleopatra, for inspiring the creation of a cosmetics industry — and with it, a standard of beauty — that continues to affect our lives 2,000 years later. During her reign from 51 to 30 B.C., her choices of body adornments made a fashion statement that influenced Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans alike. A Greek-speaking direct descendant of the Macedonian general who served under Alexander the Great, Cleopatra ruled over the tastes of the ancient world by drawing upon both Greek and Egyptian traditions of using minerals and other natural compounds to tint the face and fingernails. Her eye shadowing with kohl (a mixture of soot, burnt almonds, and malachite), which she also used to darken both her lashes and brows, and the way she tinted her nails by staining them with a flowering plant called henna, were said to be works of art.
These beauty practices may well have started several thousand years before Cleopatra, however, as an outgrowth of religious ceremonies. It is even thought that perfumery evolved from the burning of resins and gums as incense for ceremonial use. Certain types of cosmetics, or combinations of colors that denoted social class, could only be worn by members of the ruling elite, with violators subject to execution. A parallel tradition arose in China, where the wealthy wore nail polish fashioned from beeswax, gelatin, gum arabic, and egg whites, and only the nobility were allowed to paint their nails gold and silver, which signified the wealth of precious metals.
By 500 B.C., Greek women were applying lead and chalk powder to their faces and crushed mulberries as rouge. Roman women later adopted these practices and added the use of red lipstick made from ochre clays. "A woman without paint is like food without salt," wrote the Roman playwright Plautus (254-184 B.C.), expressing an attitude that prevailed among both sexes, that cosmetics were essential to a woman's sex appeal. But by the first century A.D., Roman poet and satirist Juvenal reflected a different perspective: "This coated face which is covered with so many drugs and where unfortunate husbands press their lips, is it a face or a sore?" He was acknowledging what many had come to suspect — that cosmetics containing toxic mercury compounds, and facial powders containing lead, posed a danger to the health of both the male admirers doing the kissing and those women being kissed.
Attitudes about cosmetics did not undergo another shift until one thousand years later, when the physician and cosmetologist Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, a Spanish Moor also known by the name Abulcasis, wrote a thirty-volume medical practices encyclopedia in which one chapter was devoted solely to cosmetics. He believed that cosmetics constituted a legitimate branch of medicine, which he called the Medicine of Beauty — a concept that has been adopted by the twentieth century cosmetics industry with the advent of claimed anti-aging products.
The commercial perfume industry got its first official blessing in 1190 A.D. when Henry VI, who ruled both England and parts of France, issued patent letters to perfume sellers in Paris. Four centuries later another English monarch, Queen Elizabeth I, made the practice of wearing white lead paint facial make-up popular in the early years of her reign, but the fashion fell out of favor with many of her subjects during the black plague; rumors spread that cosmetics might pose a threat to health because they blocked "body vapors" from naturally circulating. (These concerns, warranted or not, might well constitute the first-ever consumer health alert.) During the subsequent reign of Charles II, however, the nobility and upper classes returned to the heavy use of make-up, including red rouge and lipstick, in the belief that it made them look younger and healthier. One concession to safety: zinc oxide began to replace lead as a facial powder.
Early eighteenth-century Italy saw facial powder at the center of the biggest scandal ever to befall a cosmetics manufacturer. A woman named Signora Toffana, who was well known in upper-class social circles, created a face powder that contained lead and arsenic and sold it to the wives of noblemen and the wealthy. The more affectionate the husband was with pecks on his wife's cheeks, the faster he died from the toxic powder. An estimated 600 husbands died this way, and Toffana was executed as an accomplice in their deaths.
During the reign of Britain's Queen Victoria in the late nineteenth century, cosmetics once again fell into disfavor in that country. The queen considered facial make-up to be vulgar and improper for ladies, and acceptable to wear only if you were an actor or a prostitute. Being simple and plain — which is to say, Victorian — went on to impact much of the English-speaking world's conception of beauty for many years.
The early twentieth century's spirit of discovery and innovation helped to jump-start renewed interest in matters of body care. During the two decades prior to the First World War, an unprecedented number of creations were unveiled that would transform the formulations of cosmetics and create a personal-care products industry:
• A deodorant invented in Philadelphia and marketed as "Mum" was followed by other deodorants and antiperspirants containing aluminum chloride as the active ingredient.
• The first synthetic hair dye, called "Aureole," was created in the lab of a French chemist.
• Another chemist, in New York, formulated a synthetic mascara and named the product Maybelline, after his sister Mabel.
• In Baltimore, a pharmacist created a skin cream called Dr. Bunting's Sunburn Remedy, later known as Noxzema.
A marriage between celebrity status and public perceptions about the desirability of using cosmetics took firm root in the late nineteenth century with the spreading popularity of photography, and then later with the advent of motion pictures. Women who had previously shunned adorning their faces with cosmetics began to request their application when they sat for portraits in photography studios. It was in this period of the 1880s that internationally known British stage actress Lillie Langtry provided one of the first celebrity endorsements of cosmetics. She used make-up both during her performances and in her normal life off-stage, setting an example that inspired countless women to begin painting their own faces.
A New Cleopatra
Playing the movie role of Cleopatra in 1917, silent film star Theda Bara, Hollywood's first sex symbol, caused a sensation by wearing layers of cosmetics applied by Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetic industrialist responsible for introducing mascara and colored facial powders to mainstream consumers. Theda Bara started another fashion trend by painting her toenails, which newspapers and magazines breathlessly reported to be a milestone in the annals of beauty innovation.
Hollywood films and their glamorous players became the engine generating much of the consumer demand for wider choices in cosmetics and personal-care products. Polish immigrant Max Factor, known as the father of modern make-up, specialized in developing products for movie actors and later introduced these creations to the general public with the marketing pitch that "every girl could look like a movie star" if she just used his cosmetics. Swedish actress Greta Garbo further refined the use of cosmetics until she had "completely altered the face of the fashionable woman," according to the history book The Glass of Fashion, describing that period.
By 1929 a bevy of Hollywood actresses had generated still another new fashion trend — skin tanning, using specially formulated self-tanning liquids and powders. It wasn't until 1936 that a chemist, Eugene Schueller, founder of L'Oreal, invented the first sunscreen. Another eight years would pass before Florida pharmacist Benjamin Green created the first mass- marketed suntan lotion, which came to be known as Coppertone.
During the Roaring Twenties chemists further expanded the cosmetics industry with their laboratory discoveries:
• A group of chemical preservatives called parabens were inserted into products for their anti-microbial effects, and within a few years parabens became the most widely used preservatives in cosmetics and personal-care products.
• An odorless and colorless group of chemical compounds called phthalates were added to cosmetics and personal-care products for the first time to increase their flexibility and to stabilize fragrances.
Fragrances were historically treated as luxury items for use only on special occasions, but by the twentieth century were being used by many women daily. Up until 1921, when Chanel No. 5 was introduced to consumers, perfume fragrances had mostly been derived from natural ingredients and essential oils. Chanel revolutionized the fragrance industry with the introduction of aldehydes and other synthetics, which gave fragrances greater consistency and stability at lower cost. Synthetics captured the imagination of manufacturers, and their advantages helped blind the industry to any consideration of the unknown impact these synthetic ingredients would have on health. Beginning in the 1970s, synthetic scents, usually associated only with perfumes, had been integrated into so many cosmetics and personal-care products that they were a part of normal daily experience.
As Synthetics Multiplied, So Did Health Problems
As use of synthetic chemicals grew, the impacts on human health became impossible to ignore. A skin cream called Koremlu, sold through department stores, contained thallium acetate, which was also used as a rodent poison. Reports began surfacing from hospitals and physicians in 1930 that users of one cream were developing paralysis, abdominal pain, blindness, and other severe symptoms. Only after injured consumers filed lawsuits against the manufacturer was the cream removed from the market in 1932, though in some areas of the U.S. the product continued to be sold for another year.
Exposés began to appear in the media showing how widespread the dangers to health and safety had become. A book called American Chamber of Horrors revealed how the rush to create new chemical concoctions for cosmetics had maimed and even killed women. But the book caused barely a ripple in the demand for these beauty enhancers.
One particularly egregious case of unsafe chemicals in cosmetic products involved dozens of women going blind in 1933 as a result of using Lash Lure, a synthetic aniline dye marketed as an eyelash and eyebrow colorant. Aniline comes from coal tar and is also used in hair dyes. Even after blindness and at least one death were documented as resulting from use of the product, it remained on the market for five more years because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration neglected to warn the public and had no regulatory authority to remove dangerous cosmetic products from store shelves.
Authority for such action finally came in 1938, from new regulations called the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act — but that authority was limited. The act defined a cosmetic as "an article intended to be rubbed, poured, sprinkled, sprayed on, introduced into, or otherwise applied to the human body for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance." Under the act, cosmetics manufacturers were still not required to evaluate the safety of ingredients prior to the marketing and sale of products. And only after a cosmetic had injured or killed enough people for the pattern of risk to be brought to the FDA's attention would the FDA then have the authority to remove that product from the market. Two kinds of products were excluded from the 1938 law — all soaps, and coal tar dyes, such as the one responsible for the Lash Lure injuries. The law simply required that a label be placed on coal tar dye products warning that "blindness may result from the use of this product."
"During the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s," writes Teresa Riordan in her book Inventing Beauty: A History of the Innovations that Have Made Us Beautiful, "industry was transmuting oil into a mother-lode of new wonder synthetics. Researchers broke down natural petroleum into its constituent parts and put them back together in sophisticated new combinations."
During this period of rapid innovation, the following events took place that would set the stage for many of the trends now affecting our lives:
• In 1958, nearly 200 chemicals in foods were declared safe by the FDA, not based on any laboratory testing, but because they had already been in common use in consumer products. This category is called Generally Recognized As Safe.
• In 1966, the U.S. Congress passed the Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, requiring that all consumer products be honestly labeled, which since then has been frequently ignored.
• In 1972, possibly harmful levels of lead were found in three major brands of toothpaste. The FDA took no action because it received assurances from manufacturers that the leaded tubes believed to be the source of the contamination would be phased out of use.
• In 1977, the FDA banned the use of six carcinogenic color additives from cosmetics: Yellow #1, Blue #6, and Reds #10, 11, 12, and 13, which were used in lipsticks. Though the six additives were banned, they were not removed from the marketplace by the FDA or manufacturers, which meant that products containing the color additives continued to be sold for years afterward until existing supplies were depleted.
• In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences, in a report to the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, singled out fragrance ingredients as a category of nervous system toxins that should be studied for their impact on human health. Little attention within either government or industry was paid to this warning.
Rather than wait for ingredients in consumer products to cause harm to public health, as remains the tradition in the U.S., many European policymakers in the early 1990s began pushing for the establishment of a legal "precautionary principle" based on the idea that harm to consumer health should not need to be established with "full scientific certainty" before corrective action is taken. Manufacturers would have to prove their product ingredients were safe to use before marketing them to consumers.
Under this precautionary principle, the European Union countries in 2000 banned two phthalates — DBP and DEHP — from all cosmetics and personal-care products sold in all of its member nations, because these ingredients were suspected of being a threat to health. In that same year, two scientists at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed a method of detecting phthalates in human body fluids that enabled researchers to measure the "body burden" of these chemicals for the first time. Subsequent CDC blood testing of 289 average Americans found DBP, the most toxic of the phthalates, in every person tested.
A lab analysis in 2002 of seventy-two products, ranging from perfume fragrances to hair sprays, deodorants, and body lotions, found that three- quarters of them contained unlabeled phthalates, according to Health Care Without Harm and the Environmental Working Group. Two years later the Environmental Working Group tested umbilical cord blood from newborns and detected 287 synthetic chemicals, including 180 chemicals that are known to cause cancer in humans or animals, demonstrating that mothers are passing their body burdens of synthetic chemicals directly into their unborn children during gestation, with unpredictable consequences for their children's health later in life.
All of this history, taken together, illustrates how and why we in the U.S. are so vulnerable to exposure to toxic ingredients in products whose safety most people have taken for granted. As you will discover in greater detail in the following pages, the government that should be protecting us either has misplaced priorities or has been asleep on the job.
CHAPTER 2
The Chemical Threat to Your Health
Before we talk about why most American consumers remain in the dark about the health threat posed by cosmetics and personal-care products, we need to talk a little bit about what that threat is and how we know it's a threat.
Your Skin Is a Carrier, Not a Barrier
Often called our "miracle garment" because it is so strong yet soft, skin is the body's largest organ; the average adult is covered by about ten square feet of it. Averaging less than one-tenth of an inch in thickness, a square inch of it holds about twenty blood vessels, 650 sweat glands, and 1,000 nerve endings.
Your skin is enough of a barrier to keep fluids within your body (except for its controlled release of perspiration through sweat glands), but it also readily absorbs many things with which it comes into contact. When your skin wrinkles after being immersed in water, for example, it does so because it has expanded from absorbing some of that water.
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Excerpted from "Healthy Beauty"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Samuel S. Epstein, MD.
Excerpted by permission of BenBella Books, Inc..
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