We primp, we perm, we powder - without blinking a mascara-lined eye about the potentially harmful ingredients we expose ourselves to in the name of beauty. Yet, walking into most salons is like entering a toxic cloud of ammonia and formaldehyde, not to mention an alphabet soup of chemicals you can’t smell. Over-the-counter beauty products aren’t much better, with most containing potential irritants and carcinogens. Unfortunately, these hazards are virtually ignored by the $28-billion-a-year mainstream cosmetics industry.

How safe are the cosmetics we use? A recent report published by the American Journal of Public Health found that women who dye their hair have a 50 percent higher risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and men using commercial hair dyes have twice the risk of multiple myeloma, a malignant tumor of the bone marrow. Another study, by Italy’s University of Pisa, found a link between certain skin creams and thyroid toxicity.

Ruth Winter, author of A Consumer’s Dictionary of Cosmetic Ingredients, notes that “even though it has now been accepted that all chemicals penetrate the skin to some extent and many do so in significant amounts,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn’t require pre-market approval for cosmetics and is powerless to mandate safety testing. Although most cosmetic companies voluntarily test their products for common sensitivities, researchers from the National Research Council found that “of the tens of thousands of commercially important chemicals, only a few have been subjected to extensive toxicity testing and most have scarcely been tested at all.”
That doesn’t surprise Denise Santamaria, a professional manicurist and owner of Natural Nouveaux, a non-toxic salon in Las Vegas, Nevada, who was diagnosed with chemically-induced lupus. “I started getting sick when I began taking cosmetology classes,” she says. “Over the next 10 years, I battled digestive problems, frequent sinus infections, and excruciating pain in my back, chest and arms. It got so bad that there were days when I would crawl across the floor, almost as if I was trying to get away from the pain.” Neither she nor the doctors who treated her made any connection between her medical problems and the scores of chemicals she was exposed to in her job until a chemical screening showed high levels of the toxins benzene and toluene - both common ingredients in nail polish and polish remover.