Toxic Beauty in New Zealand Sunday Star Times
March 1, 2009 by DawnM
Filed under Health Issues, Interviews
Is your skincare harming your health?
The New Zealand Sunday Star Times ran a feature today about the toxic synthetic chemicals used in cosmetic products. The article features part of an interview I did with Karen Tay, a journalist for the newspaper.
A snippet of the article is below and you can click on the link at the bottom to read the full article.
Is your skincare harming you? Sunday Star Times. New Zealand. Sunday 1st March, 2009.
“Many of the toxins in ordinary beauty products are hidden amid a long list of unpronounceable ingredients - if they are listed at all. This is what most angers British author Dawn Mellowship, who wrote Toxic Beauty.
“Some products, like fragrances, can have up to 200 different synthetic ingredients but because they have trade secret status, they don’t have to list all the ingredients,” she says. “A lot of cosmetics can also get contaminated during production. It’s good to do some research and at least avoid the more well-known toxins - such as aluminium in anti-perspirants, parabens and PEG (polyethylene glycol).”
Mellowship suffers from chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, debilitiating disorders which causes her skin to react strongly against generic beauty brands.
“I had already changed my diet to an organic vegan diet and changed other areas of my lifestyle. Then I started looking at the back of my shower gels and shampoos and thinking, ‘what are these ingredients?’ When I started reading about it, I was shocked and quite angry about what I found. Consumers are hoodwinked because they don’t really understand what’s going into the products, all they see are the advertising and marketing.”
The toxins she refers to in the book are those easily found in common supermarket products that you might throw in along with the weekly grocery shop. Ingredients such as DEA (diethanolamine) -which can be found in anything from bubble bath to hair dyes, shaving cream and liquid hand soap - has proven to be toxic when tested on the skin of rats and mice.
Another dubious ingredient are “parabens”, which refer to a group of chemicals used as preservatives. In the book, Mellowship cites a study by senior oncology lecturer Dr Phillipa Darbre from the University of Reading, who found intact concentrations of parabens in human breast tumours. And in a Danish study where male volunteers applied cosmetics containing parabens, the substances were found in their bloodstream within the hour…
Read the full article on Stuff.co.nz
