Super Eco

Photo credit: yenhoon, stock.xchng

Nobody does blemish concealer better than the cosmetics industry. Let's face it, most consumers assume that the government is watchdogging the ingredients in our lotions and potions to a degree that we can slather up with confidence. Umm ... Think again.

However, we found a dog that will hunt. The green standard, in this case, is the Skin Deep cosmetics safety database from the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Skin Deep pairs ingredients in more than 41,000 products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory databases, making it the largest integrated data resource of its kind. As Skin Deep itself puts it:  "Why did a small nonprofit take on such a big project? Because the FDA doesn't require companies to test their own products for safety."

Skin Deep doesn't simply dump a list of chemicals into your lap. Two scores give you easy-to-compare benchmarks to help you judge both the absolute and relative safety of a particular product.

• The hazard score represents an amalgamation of  known and suspected hazards, collected from more than 50 definitive databases. Product hazard ratings can be higher than those of their individual ingredients, scaling upward in products that include ingredients that increase skin absorption.
• The data gap rating measures how much is not known about a particular ingredient and why. For instance, some ingredients may show low hazard scores because they have not have been studied or assessed completely, yet other ingredients may retain low hazard scores after thorough scrutiny.

Two other nifty features at Skin Deep:

• Sunscreen: What's Safe and What Works We find ourselves here every spring, once we've caught a glimpse of the barrage that lurks on the sunscreen aisle.
• What Not to Buy Nice and simple— what more needs to be said?

So why is it so hard to figure out what's safe and what's not, anyway? Speak up and voice your displeasure! Get involved at The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, and send your enthusiastic young teen to Teens for Safe Cosmetics. It's an issue that's definitely more than skin deep.