How Safe Are Your Beauty Products

Host: Can make up really be toxic? I’m here to find out for myself, so I went straight to the source. The chemistries formulas are behind the worlds most famous cosmetics. For 30-years, he’s developed and tested makeup and he took us inside his lab to show us how it’s done. What’s some of the surprising ingredients that are found in make up.

Male: From the color aside, we have carmine which is animal derive and it comes from the wings of beetles.

Host: So that might be found in lipsticks--

Male: Lipsticks, eye shadows, we have lanolin which comes from sheep’s wool and we have guanine which comes from fish scales and it’s used as a neuro descent pigment in nail acrylics.

Host: That's repulsive. Every time I kiss someone, I’ll be giving them fish scales, it’s disgusting. It’s in your lipstick, and what would you say if I told you it’s made from beetle parts? That would be yucky.

Male: All of these ingredients are purified, deodorized.

Host: So you’re fully confident that any make up that I buy is going to be safe?

Male: Oh yes, every cosmetic product you buy in any store, in any part of the world is safe.

Host: How are you so confident?

Male: Because I know what the requirements are for this country with the food and drug administration.

Host: I talked to the director of research at the environmental working group who could not disagree more. Do you think that there is adequate oversight from the FDA?

Male: That oversight on this industry from the FDA is almost completely absent. FDA has so little authority and not to regulate the industry.

Host: Can you list some of the specific toxins that worry you the most?

Male: Peravin preservatives, these are potential harmful disruptive that are very, very common in products. DMDM because it releases the carcinogens formaldehyde into our products, chemicals that have the letters PEG in them have chemicals. These are petro-chemicals that are very often contaminated with carcinogenic contaminants.

Host: Savannah Okana, co author of the book “No More Dirty Looks” the truth about beauty products and has this to say.

Savannah Okana: My skin care philosophy is actually pretty simple which is if you can't be sure that something is safe, don’t use it. There are over 10,000 ingredients used in cosmetics.

Host: Do you know what that is?

Savannah Okana: No. it sounds difficult, difficult to pronounce, it must be a very complex chemical product.

Host: I’ve spoken with a dermatologist of the Albert Einstein College of medicine in New York who says keeps your lipstick on ladies, its okay. Is make up toxic?

Savannah Okana: I think that there’s a lot of hype. I think there’s not enough data at this point to say that any of the ingredients are toxic. If it was they would have banned it.

Host: So I went to the drugstore and I buy make up, is there anything to be concerned about?

Female: No, you have a certain skin condition then you have to be cautious of that obviously but if it’s using something that you’re afraid of that it’s going to kill you. There's not any data that anything is really going to harm you internally.

Host: So what do us make of all this confusing, conflicting information? Are we destined for life with no mascara, no eye shadow, and no fun? Well at least the experts agree on these points.

Female: The fewer the ingredients the better, flip over the bottle, look for words you recognize. If there’s a lot of X’s and Y’s, some sort of scary words that you can't pronounce. There maybe some things in there that aren’t too great for you.

Host: What's the one thing you would say to a woman who wants to wear a make up?

Female: Keep putting on make up, just shift to safer products. Cut out what you don’t know, don’t drive yourself crazy and take a look at the ingredient label, get educated and buy better stuff.