When you buy any health and beauty product, did you ever wonder if all those weird sounding ingredients were harmful? Have you ever wondered if the products you buy are carcinogenic? Now you can find out.
The Environmental Working Group has a Cosmetics Database site that is a compendium of many common HABA products ranked for safety based on all those odd sounding ingredients.
I have an old bottle of shampoo I never used, since I wasn’t crazy about the product. It was purchased in the Health Food store downtown awhile back. I ran it through the database, out of curiosity. It came up 6 out of 10 for harmfulness! The problem ingredients are ones we see often on shampoo and conditioner ingredient lists– methylparaben, propylparaben, cocamide DEA, sodium laureth sulfate, and “fragrance”. I was wondering why the local health food store no longer stocked Nature’s Gate products, and I think I just got my answer! Many of these ingredients are either carcinogenic or cause organ damage.
On the site are also lists of which products in each group have been rated zero out of 10 for harmfulness, so you can make informed purchases of these types of products.
This is a great resource for anyone who wishes to purchase products that are environmentally neutral and not harmful to us, nor to our children and pets, nor to our water supply.
[...] live with harmful carcinogenic chemicals every single day– the chemicals in our shampoos, soaps and other beauty aids, the fire retardant in most upholstery, rugs and bedding fabrics, the endocrine disruptor triclosan [...]