The hidden (and high) cost of beauty
My wife has been searching for skin care products and makeup that would be suitably non-allergenic yet affordable. Being an up and coming techno-geek she turned immediately to Google for help in finding what she sought.
I confess to being fairly oblivious to all things related to women’s skin care, makeup, clothing etc. especially when my wife is glued to the long-armed shopper that is the computer but within half an hour of starting her search she managed to get my attention.
It was her first “This is just horrible!” that got my attention. Thinking to myself, “Makeup? How horrible can it be unless what she likes has turned out to be more than 6 months take home pay”, then I thought “Maybe she’s digressed from searching for makeup and started looking through the local obits and found a lost acquaintance listed there”.
Nope. Nothing that simple, nosiree. What she’d stumbled across was a website dedicated to documenting hazardous materials used in producing women’s products. Huh? Yup. You got it. All sorts of dangerous, harmful, carcinogenic, cell and gene altering junk is used to make women’s beauty products. Much to my extreme surprise what was one item that figured high on the lipstick line? Lead. Can you believe it? In this day and age lead is being used in women’s lipstick. Un-be-lievable! What ticked her off mightily was finding out that to limit the use of lead in lipstick was proposed in California but the industry lobbyists swarmed all over ‘em and nipped that baby in the bud before it could eat into any of their profits.
She was scrolling through an endless line of well-known (even I knew some the names) companies and products and exclaimed repeatedly at the list of harmful ingredients and frightened because she had used many of these products most of her adult life.
She got my attention.
You can read what she found: