Health and Fitness

I decided to start my research on toxins in beauty products by heading to the local library. The “new nonfiction” section had two books, both published earlier this year, that caught my eye. Green Babies, Sage Moms: The Ultimate Guide to Raising Your Organic Baby by Lynda Fassa, and The Body Toxic: How the Hazardous Chemistry of Everyday Things Threatens Our Health and Well-being by Nena Baker. I’ll get to The Body Toxic in a later post, but for now, here’s some information I got from the Green Babies book.

Green Babies, Sage Moms has several chapters that deal with beauty products - specifically, what to avoid using during pregnancy, and what not to use on your baby. Now, I don’t know how much research went into writing this book, so I can’t guarantee that the information I got from it is completely accurate, but I did find out about two groups of chemicals that the author recommends avoiding in cosmetics, hair and skin care, and other products. One group is parabens, and the other is pthalates. Parabens are easy enough to identify in an ingredient list because the word “paraben” will be in the ingredient if it is one. Phthalates are harder to identify because some of them have names that don’t say phthalate in them, and they are frequently included in fragrance, which is listed as simply “fragrance” on the label.

When I was pregnant, I started using more natural brands of beauty products, because I’d heard about chemicals potentially causing fetal damage, but I didn’t know which chemicals I should be avoiding. After reading this book, I was curious to see if the products I bought were free of pthalates and parabens or not. Since beauty products aren’t regulated very much, it’s easy for a brand to claim to be all natural, but it’s harder to know if that claim means anything.

I was happy to find out that my Burts Bees lotions, both for me and baby, are pthalate and paraben free. My Trader Joe’s shampoo is pthalate free, but not paraben free. It’s also free of laurel sulfate, so I assume that’s another chemical to avoid, but it hasn’t come up in my reading yet - obviously I have more research to do. My non-natural hair conditioner, not surprisingly, contains all kinds of chemicals I’ve never heard of, including some pthalates and parabens. (As I said in my first post on this topic, I’ve yet to find an even slightly natural conditioner that works well with my hair type, but I’m on a mission to find one.) My sugar scrubs - one for my face made by daisywares, and a Trader Joe’s brand scrub for body - seem to have the safest ingredients of anything in my bathroom: sugar, edible plant-derived oils, and natural fragrances.