WALK through the personal care aisles of your local store and you’ll see dozens of products that promise to soften your skin, make you smell better, extend your lashes, decrease wrinkling, tame your curly hair, or even semi-permanently change the color of your lips, hair or skin.
As an epidemiologist who has fought my own fertility battles, I study exposure to endocrine-disrupting chemicals found in everyday products, such as cosmetics, shampoos, lotions and plastics. I have been working to raise awareness of the health risks to young people and encourage prudent use of cosmetic products.
Personal care products contain many types of chemicals that manufacturers add for specific purposes, including some that can interfere with or disrupt the normal functioning of the endocrine system. Many of these chemicals can co-occur in products, putting consumers at risk of exposure to multiple chemicals at once, and sometimes without warning, as labels do not always list endocrine-disrupting chemicals among the ingredients.As you rub cosmetic products onto your skin, breathe in their scent or use them to brush your teeth, the chemicals found within can travel throughout your body, targeting your endocrine, nervous and cardiovascular systems.
Neurological conditions such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder , cognitive impairment and depression have also been linked to chemicals added to cosmetic products. So have cardiovascular issues such as high blood pressure, insulin resistance and coronary heart disease.amount of exposure, the type of chemical and how the chemical interacts with the endocrine system.
Furthermore, 80 percent of the women we surveyed did not know whether their cosmetic products contained harmful chemicals.