Lately I’ve noticed that my skin was much more oilier than usual. The anti-bacterial soap we use at our house is much too strong for the face, so I thought about purchasing a facial wash. I surfed online to sephora.com to check out what kind of products they have. I was curious enough to look through some of the ingredients and came across a useful website - cosmeticdatabase.com.

What Cosmetic Database does is publish the reports from various sources of their findings of the effects of certain chemicals. You can search by chemical name AND brand name! They rate each product on a safety meter and they cite their sources for further inquiry. Another chart that was interesting is the ‘percentage of ingredients that had no data, or haven’t gone through FDA, or have a high hazard.

During my teenage years, I was loyal to the cosmetic brand Shiseido. However, reading about the chemicals now, I realize the “fresh tingling feeling” may not have signified cleanliness. A lot of their products actually contain toxic chemicals that promotes further skin irritations and form allergies. I even found a couple that violated chemical concentration standards!

Here’s a quote from one of their reports:

Environmental Working Group (EWG) detected 16 chemicals from 4 chemical families - phthalates, triclosan, parabens, and musks - in blood and urine samples from 20 teen girls aged 14-19. Studies link these chemicals to potential health effects including cancer and hormone disruption.

The 20 teens we tested had an average of 13 hormone-altering cosmetics chemicals in their bodies.

You can learn a lot with a little bit of curiosity from this website. For example, I learned of “bioaccumulation” and other human and environmental biological terms. You find information on environmental effects as well as human effects.

Cosmetic Database goes beyond just the industry of cosmetics. For example, they have reports of food items & chemicals too. Wait till you see what you’re ingesting…

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