Natural's Not In It

It seems like every few months, we in the skin business are made aware of another horribly toxic chemical to avoid.  Interesting that these chemicals, usually preservatives, are most commonly found in cosmetics, hair dye, and skin care products-all used primarily by women. Hmm...I'm not going to embark on a postfeminst tirade here, but it is a fact that we will happily suffer in the quest for superficial beauty.

 Historically, ladies everywhere have applied noxious unguents and suffered painful and degrading procedures at the hands of someone like me. Way back in Ye Olden Times, women dropped Belladonna in their eyeballs to dilate their pupils, and let leeches suck the blood from their cheeks to be paler. In Asia, lovely ladies painted their teeth black and did away with their eyebrows altogether. My favorite deadly concoction, commonly used throughout Europe until the late 1800s, was a delightful blend of carbonate hydroxide and lead oxide. Yep, that's the same lead oxide that is so toxic, you shouldn't even live in a house that's been painted with it.

 It took quite awhile for the medical community to determine that all that swooning wasn't necessarily due to womens' delicate constitution, and that perhaps a swoon was actually a seizure. When all the pretty damsels started dropping like flies, nobody really suggested that the deadly face powder was the culprit for a long time, even though it was an obvious common denominator. They didn't want it to be so bad 'cause it made the ladies look so good.

All of the dangerously beautiful substances I just mentioned were completely natural, and by today's standards, one hundred percent organic. My point is that preservatives exist for very good reasons in many cases. Natural is not categorically good, and chemicals are not always bad. Having said that, I do think that using organics and clean, plant-based cosmetics is a good idea. I just don't think it is reasonable to alleviate preservatives from our lives altogether.

Everyone is all up in arms about parabens lately. Here is the straight dirty as I understand it: parabens are bad, but it would take an unfathomable amount to have an estrogenic, hence cancer-causing, effect. According to the Food and Drug Administration's most recent studies,
"The FDA is aware that estrogenic activity in the body is associated with certain forms of breast cancer. Although parabens can act similarly to estrogen, they have been shown to have much less estrogenic activity than the body’s naturally occurring estrogen. For example, a 1998 study (Routledge et al., in Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology) found that the most potent paraben tested in the study, butylparaben, showed from 10,000- to 100,000-fold less activity than naturally occurring estradiol (a form of estrogen). Further, parabens are used at very low levels in cosmetics. In a review of the estrogenic activity of parabens, (Golden et al., in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, 2005) the author concluded that based on maximum daily exposure estimates, it was implausible that parabens could increase the risk associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals."

The bottom line is that I still use products with parabens in them. But I've always been a risk-taker. I like to live on the edge. In the immortal words of Gang of Four, "This heaven gives me migraine."

Topics: skin , Gang of Four , parabens , preservatives