Purely Cosmetic?

A New Report Gives Risk Ratings to Thousands of Personal Care Products. It Reveals How Little Is Known About Them -- but Not Whether There's Really Much to Fear

You're already counting calories or carbs, measuring your weight and your BMI, monitoring your blood pressure and cholesterol. Do you really need another health-related number to reckon with?

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit public-interest research group known for making connections between chemical exposure and adverse health conditions, thinks you may. The Washington-based organization has made it easy to calculate your risk of exposure to potentially harmful substances through the personal care products you use. In its new "Skin Deep" study, funded by the Heinz Family Foundation, the Beldon Fund and the John Merck Fund, EWG uses a complex formula to assign a health-risk rating to each of 7,500 personal-care products.

In EWG's assessment, Just For Men Brush-In Color Gel for Mustache, Beard & Sideburns, Natural Real Black merits a whopping 9.5 score (on a scale of 0 to 10, the top end reflecting the highest risk). Rite Aid Pure Baby Oil comes in for a tiny 1.1 rating. In between are Crest Rejuvenating Effects Liquid Gel Toothpaste (4.3) and Speed Stick Deodorant Solid, Fresh Scent at 5.3. EWG says all those products impose a cumulative chemical load about which too little is known.

The rating system offers a means of quantifying the answer to a controversial question: Just what are we doing to ourselves when we slather stuff on our bodies? At first blush, the numbers may scare you. Dig deeper and you'll find much that could temper your fear -- or, depending on your point of view, fire your temper.

People like Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) applaud EWG's work, saying it's time for the cosmetics industry to change. "Consumers need better information about the ingredients used in their personal care products," said DeGette. "Providing consumers with better access to this information is an important first step."

But the industry says the public shouldn't fear its products. Gerald McEwen, vice president for science of the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association (CTFA), maintains that "cosmetics really are safe. There are not a huge number of complaints, and no evidence of a lot of health problems from their use."

In any case, the context for any possible risks need to be taken into account. Michael Thun, head of epidemiology for the American Cancer Society, says that "evidence doesn't support the view [that cosmetics are major contributors to cancer risk] at all. If cosmetics pose any [cancer] risk at all, that risk is very small compared to known major risks like smoking, [poor] nutrition, obesity and physical inactivity and sunlight."

EWG itself encourages a moderate response to the data. EWG project director Jane Houlihan says Skin Deep's findings are "cause for concern, but not alarm."

Calculating Risk

Finding your cosmetics risk rating is easy and even kind of fun: Just go to the "Skin Deep" report (www.ewg.org/reports/skindeep/) and type in the brand name of your deodorant, toothpaste, soap, shampoo and whatever else you use. (EWG research shows the typical adult uses nine such products per day.) The site will tell you how many ingredients the products collectively contain (the average adult load is 126 unique chemicals, says EWG), and rate the aggregate health threat those ingredients may pose.

Each product is ranked according to its ingredients' potential to cause cancer, trigger allergic reactions, interfere with the endocrine (hormonal) system, impair reproduction or damage a developing fetus; any harmful impurities in the product are also considered. Containing unstudied ingredients or a "penetration enhancer" that helps chemicals get absorbed through the skin also enter into the equation, as does any violation of industry safety recommendations surrounding its use.

EWG compiled a master list of ingredients in personal-care products and compared those components with known and suspected chemical health hazards on government, industry and academic lists.

Not all sources carry equal weight in the EWG formula. The presence of progesterone on the federal government's list of known or suspected carcinogens helps bump the rating for DDF Organic Sunblock, SPF 30, to 8.5. Meanwhile, said Houlihan, less weight is given to a list offered by authors of the controversial book "Our Stolen Future" (OSF), which examines synthetic chemicals' potential threat to the endocrine system. And so the presence of the so-called parabens chemicals (butyl-, methyl, ethyl-, and propyl-) had less of an effect on the rating of Peter Thomas Roth Titanium Dioxide Sunblock SPF 30, which received a 7.0 score. OSF-supplied data show the parabens may alter hormone levels, but the industry's safety review panel calls them "safe as used."

Industry, Police Thyself

One of the key data sources of the EWG report is the Cosmetic Ingredient Review (CIR) panel, the industry's voluntary oversight body. Cosmetics aren't subject to the same federal regulation that drugs and foods receive; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't conduct pre-market reviews or safety checks of cosmetics or their ingredients.

In the absence of such controls, the CIR conducts reviews of scientific data regarding ingredients that have come to its attention, usually because their use is becoming more widespread or because published research raises safety concerns. The group conducts a few dozen reviews each year. The CIR doesn't conduct scientific studies of its own but relies on research done by others, including manufacturers.