What’s really in your beauty products? Report raises concerns over hidden ingredients

So every day we consume and we also use products for beauty, also to personal care products or just clothing. ChemForward is on a mission right now to have all products that are in our everyday products vetted before we even put it on our body. Recently, their team released its very latest findings from the Ingredient Intelligence Report after analyzing more than 156,000 beauty products. To dive more deeply into that, let's get to Heather McKinney right now from ChemForward. Thank you for being here. We appreciate it. I understand that your team led an industry initiative. They looked into the ingredients, and you guys really released that data recently. Let's talk a little bit about what this analysis involved and what were some of the most surprising findings. Well, one of our biggest takeaways was that as science evolves, our approach to commonly used ingredients should too. We saw the percentage of chemicals of concern increase about 2% since last year. And that was largely due to new scientific evidence of potential concern for ingredients that we've been using and that have been considered safe for years. Okay, so let's dive into some of the items that we use every day. I mean, I mentioned makeup and clothing. What other things did you guys look into? Well, we looked into all sorts of beauty and personal care products. So that includes anything you would use to beautify or clean your body. So it also includes things like shampoo and hair care. And so we saw... Individual ingredients to keep an eye out for, specifically an example would be caprylyl glycol that was recently flagged for reproductive toxicity in Europe. We also identified entire categories of chemicals such as endocrine disrupting chemicals that can interfere with our body's hormone systems and the most commonly identified ingredient in that category was BHT. Okay. And then in terms of the real risk, in terms of the chemicals, you mentioned a few, specifically though in Europe and some of those chemicals being banned. What are the concerns here? Are there real concerns with specific chemicals that are maybe found in our everyday products that we put on our body? Yeah, well, you think about using a product every single day, you're using a little bit and that could be absorbed into your skin. So thinking about the cumulative exposure over a day or even a lifetime, we do really want to think about identifying safer materials that go into our products. Are there any common ingredients that consumers should be paying closer to attention to? Like I mentioned, caprylyl glycol is a good example. We also saw phenethyl alcohol, which was also recently flagged for reproductive toxicity in Europe. But additionally, we can think about another category, which is formaldehyde-releasing ingredients, because formaldehyde is known to potentially cause cancer. Okay. And also, too, fragrance. I noticed this was a really interesting part. The majority of us use fragrance, right? However, it was interesting to see that your analysis found Fragrance has a transparency gap when it actually comes to its ingredients. Can you explain that? For sure. And this isn't just a personal fragrance problem. It could be in your personal care products that have a fragrance. So that term can represent a complex mixture. Sometimes it's dozens of chemicals that are not required to be listed on the product label. So that can hide potential chemicals of concern. And that makes it really challenging, if not entirely impossible, for a consumer to know what they're really being exposed to when they're using these products. All right, so let's get into things that we can do back at home. So give us two or three practical things that consumers can do just to make more informed choices when you're out there maybe shopping for a beauty product, especially around the holidays. Yeah, well, first, you can read those labels for chemicals of concern that we've identified in our reports from this year and previous years. And those are available on our website at chemforward.org. But second, you can prioritize buying products from brands and stores that publish their chemical policies. Normally, you can find them online. And these policies will tell you which ingredients are banned or restricted to certain use cases. So it'll give you the confidence that you can buy from the entire shelf without having to read those product labels. But if you wanna take it a step further, there are products that are labeled as clean or safer at certain stores, and those programs are designed to give you an extra layer of protection by avoiding some of these newer and emerging chemicals of concern. Okay. Yeah. And it's always smart just to go that extra step to make sure you know what you're putting on your body. Last question really quickly. I just want to confirm your team. It works with some well-known brands and companies in hopes of getting rid of any dangerous chemicals that may be embedded in our products. Correct? Correct. Yeah. Okay. Yes. We work closely with brands and retailers and also those ingredient suppliers who sell the raw materials to the brands to ensure that they're using safer materials before we're formulating products that end up on your shelf. All right. Well, we appreciate this and it was a very interesting analysis, especially since I'm sure A lot of us, whether we know it or not, we put something on our body, our perfume, makeup, clothing, whatever it may be. So we'll have all of that information for you over on our website, boston25news.com. Heather McKinney from Chem Forward, we appreciate you being here. Thanks so much for having me. All right, let's go over.