If you’re a human woman who regularly bathes and wears makeup, you are, as a result, slathering yourself in approximately 168 chemicals a day. Do you care? I’m not sure if I do. I mean, throw a couple more hundred chemicals in there and who knows? Maybe we’ll all become Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or whatever their makeup-altered equivalent would be.
Then again, all of the products that we use on a daily basis could have long term health risks that we don’t even know about. That’s why Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) have introduced the Personal Care Products Safety Act, a new amendment to the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act that would better regulate what gets put in beauty and hygiene products.
ABC News reports:
The 98-page bill includes a system of registering personal care companies, their products and their ingredients, and it would require the FDA to review five chemicals that appear generally in personal care products each year to evaluate their safety. The first set of chemicals will likely be diazolidinyl urea, lead acetate, methylene glycol/formaldehyde, propyl paraben, quaternium-15, according to Feinstein’s office.
“From shampoo to lotion, the use of personal care products is widespread, however, there are very few protections in place to ensure their safety,” said Sen. Feinstein in a statement.
For research, the senators have partnered with the Environmental Working Group whose vice president of government affairs, Scott Faber, says, “These are basic tools that should have been granted to the FDA decades ago, but are only now being provided in the Feinstein-Collins bill.”
Sounds good in theory, but try to take my lipstick away and you’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead, lead-poisoned hands.
Image via Getty.
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