Synthetics In Skincare: The Major Health Trade Off in Commercial Skincare Products

Beauty is only skin deep! So they say. Then why is our quest for it so intense? The average person slathers, rubs, sprays, and lathers a cool dozen different kinds of skin care products on his or her body every day.

It might pay us to take a look at exactly what we're doing. Our skin is the largest organ of the body; its first line of defense against infection and it is being stressed to the limit by chemicals we paradoxically expect it to protect us against. We like to think of skin as a barrier, but in fact, the skin acts much more like a sponge, absorbing and transferring all manner of foreign substances. Things we would never dream of eating are being transmitted into our bloodstream on a regular basis; poisons that can turn lethal are being welcomed by us as we spend enormous sums in our quest for a perfect skin.

The USFDA has a list of some 10,500 cosmetic and skin care ingredients in common use by the cosmetics industry. Almost 90% of them have never been evaluated for safety by the FDA or by any publicly accountable institution.

The European Union is light years ahead of us on this one.They have banned the use of more than a thousand personal and skincare product ingredients for use in cosmetics and skincare products, and they aren't done yet. Anything they suspect may cause cancer, birth defects, reproductive ills, or other serious health issues gets red lined. By contrast, our own USFDA has banned only ten of these ingredients for skincare products.

Phil Landrigan, MD, professor and chairman of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine and Director of the Children's Environmental Health Center at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, has named endocrine disrupters as one of the top health dangers that young people face today. These hormone disrupting chemicals have been linked to reproductive problems and cancers and some are believed to mix with enzymes inside people to produce carcinogens. And all these chemicals are being used routinely in the production of the cosmetics we happily, hopefully, and liberally, apply to our own bodies.

The irony of it all is, that the more this synthetic stuff is integrated into commercial cosmetics, the less effective they seem to get in meeting their stated purpose, that is, to give us clearer, healthier, more radiant skin. Not only do they actually affect our health adversely over the long run, but even in the short term, they rarely deliver as promised in their ads.

The high priced beauty spas are well aware of this. They rarely use commercially produced product, preferring to formulate their own from readily available, natural ingredients. This isn't a bad idea to investigate. Any individual can take a leaf out of this book. No one need go through the tedium of browsing online or haunting the health food stores for products that can be readily formulated for pennies, at home. It's not all that difficult Supermarket shelves all hold abundant natural products whose natural ingredients are regularly used in the high priced spas when they make their own skin care products. This is really not rocket science. Effective skin care products can be produced in any kitchen for pennies, and learning how to do this is not that difficult.