HELLO LOVES !
Welcome to my first ever blog and thank you so much for joining me! I hope that you will enjoy reading about my green beauty journey and that my tips and tricks will help you implement green beauty into your life. Well let's get started shall we?
Have you ever taken the time to read the back of your favourite product label? Maybe you have taken a quick glance to find those well known toxins everyone is becoming aware of. Or maybe you’re like most North Americans who buy and use a product without ever really knowing what’s inside the bottle or how it will affect your health.
As consumers, we expect and trust that companies are putting the best ingredients forward, ensuring that the products available are safe to use. This is a pretty reasonable thought, no? Unfortunately this isn’t what is happening.
The law does not require regulation for cosmetic products and ingredients (except for colour additives) to be approved by the FDA before going on the market. GRAS chemicals (“Generally Recognized as Safe”) are classified this way by the U.S. FDA based on the fact that no one has yet proven that they cause harm to human health. Our legal system in North America requires unequivocal scientific proof of harm or wrong doing. Much like the phrase “innocent until proven guilty”, products will not undergo testing or regulation until someone has a negative reaction. This means that anyone can bottle whatever they want, slap a misleading label onto it, and sell it to you and I without any testing. In fact, WE are the test bunnies in this whole billion dollar operation.
According to several research reports, between 85,000-100,000 chemicals are used in the marketplace today - of which 85% of those chemicals have never been tested for human health impacts. The U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s approval rating for products that are ‘safe for human use’ simply means that if the product doesn’t give the test-subject a terrible rash within five minutes of smearing it on, it is deemed ‘safe’. This does not, in any way, reflect an understanding of how the product’s ingredients impact internal human health, nor does it mean that the product will be safe to use for a long period of time. Even if the ingredients in every one of your personal care products were tested for safe limits and long-term health effects, absolutely no research has been conducted on the synergistic effect of all those chemicals combined.
Take, for example, the Toxic Trio - dibutyl phthalate, toluene, and formaldehyde - commonly found in nail polish. The FDA may deem an individual ingredient as ‘safe’, but hasn’t taken the precautions or done the studies of how those same ingredients affect humans when they’re blended together. The effects of a toxic cocktail are difficult to measure and they have certainly not been studied here in Canada.
Unfortunately, many people wait until they get sick or a loved one before they choose to make changes to clean, safe products in their life. If you are new to the green beauty world, navigating which products contain hidden toxic ingredients can quickly become overwhelming and often times can leave you even more confused. We want you to know - you are not alone! If you have any questions about a conventional or clean product, we are here to help you! We may not be chemists, but as makeup artists in the beauty industry for over 16 years, we are responsible for the products we choose to use on our clients and offer in our shop, so we have done the research to confidently help you through this wild world of consumer cosmetics, and avoid a potential health crisis lurking within your products.
Together we will learn, grow, and move forward in a mindful approach to beauty.
Jacqueline, xx
