Dangerous Beauty is an eye-opening expose of some of the most common ingredients used in today's personal care products. This little booklet will arm you with the knowledge to make more informed choices. No longer will you be able to participate in mindless consumerism ... ignorance may once have been bliss; but now it spells danger in our mass-manufactured, profit-driven, long shelf-life, chemical-romanced society.
Why do you need this information? Because the ingredients in cosmetics and personal care are not subjected to stringent pre-market evaluations and processes. Cosmetic and skin care companies are also not required to submit any information on the harmful effects of chemicals used in their formulations.Through this system virtually any product, regardless of safety, can be sold to the public. As consumers, we need to ask ourselves whether the cosmetics and personal care products we and our families use every day are more important to us than our long term healthy.
None of the chemicals in cosmetics and personal care products are fully tested and for most, there is only very basic information available on their health effects. The magnitude of their potential adverse effects is therefore unknown. Increasingly, there appear to be large numbers of the population affected by many of the chemicals contained in these products. The research conducted by the authors of Dangerous Beauty indicated that between 15% and 20% of people are acutely affected. Other very limited but conclusive research on these products also demonstrates that they have potential adverse effects on our health.
There is no question as to the increasing occurrence of asthma or twentieth-century diseases: multiple chemical sensitivity, auto-immune disorders such as chronic fatigue syndrome and allergies. The view of regulatory authorities is that the number of people experiencing adverse reactions is small and that others who enjoy using the products should not be deprived of them. Authorities do not investigate how many people are affected or how seriously, because this research is expensive. This is despite the fact that the companies that manufacture these products and should shoulder responsibility for their effects, make billions of dollars from them.
"After spending many years researching the toxic ingredients in skin and personal care, and successfully avoiding all of them in our Miessence products, I highly recommend Dangerous Beauty as an excellent reference for anyone questioning the safety of those strange-sounding "natural derived" ingredients in the skin and personal care products."
-- Narelle Chenery, Director of Research and Development for Organic and Natural Enterprises Pty Ltd.