What do we think of the EWG and answers to other questions - episode 250

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to The Beauty Brains.

Hello, and welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real cosmetic chemists answer your beauty questions and give you an insider's look at the cosmetic industry. This is episode 250 I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and with me today is just me, it's just me today. Valerie's actually working on some big production thing at her job, and she's not able to join us, but I wanted to get some questions answered for you guys. Guys, I went back and looked to some of the questions that were sent in most recently through, we have a spreadsheet, we list it in the show notes. You can find out how to ask a question, and let's just get to some of those beauty product questions. Now, next week when Valerie's back, we'll go through some beauty science news and some other things that we got planned. But today, I'm just answering questions. So here they come, I'll get as many in as I can.

This one comes to us from the confused consumer. She says, hi there, I heard your recent discussion on clean beauty and the myth of natural products. You said that traditional synthetic products are not safe. I have spent the last two years converting from mainstream to clean products. So I'm definitely confused.

Aren't we all? The language I have seen from the environmental working group, the EWG, is that many synthetic ingredients are potential carcinogens. I've heard that sulfates and parabens can build up in your blood over time with the use of many products and cause cancer. Yikes. What are your thoughts on this? And what do you think would be the reason why the EWG would claim that some ingredients are toxic or harmful if they weren't? Well, thank you so much for this question. The amount and type of information that's out on the internet for consumers certainly is confusing.

In fact, you know, anybody can write anything about any topic and put it on the internet, and someone's going to find it. And so it's not surprising to me that it leads to a lot of confusion. There's a lot of conflicting information out there.

In fact, the reason that we started doing The Beauty Brains was for that very reason. And it's only actually the situation has only gotten worse, especially with social media. And I can't believe that people are taking stuff that they see, you know, some teenager put on TikTok. And that leads to lawsuits for brands like Tressamay that we talked about last time. But anyway, let's talk about the EWG, the Environmental Working Group. First, they claim to be a consumer advocacy group. And, you know, I don't doubt that they certainly believe that they are doing good work and important work. And they certainly probably think that they're helping consumers. Unfortunately, their methodology is not science-based. First, there were no toxicologists that were involved in the initial creation of their Skin Deep Database. The Skin Deep Database, if you don't know, is a resource online, which presumably you put in an ingredient name and it'll kick back out a safety rating, whether, you know, how dangerous the ingredient is based on their arbitrary numbers. Like I said, it was, there weren't any toxicologists involved in creating this.

And still the number of actual scientists involved in the organization is pretty small. Looking through their list, I only saw two people who had degrees that I would say are relevant in the subject of chemistry and toxicology, which is a bit strange for a group that is, you know, giving safety ratings about chemicals.

You know, and both of these employees were hired within the last five years. So they haven't been, the organization has been around at least since I've been online. I think it's been around since the mid 1990s. Anyway, the fundamental problem with the Environmental Working Group is that they've created this rating system that it's really just based on a fiction. It is just that you can take information about a chemical and then give some sort of arbitrary safety rating or give some sort of meaningful safety rating of one to 10 Because whether something is safe or harmful, it really depends on two things. First, what the chemical is, but second, how much and how you're exposed to the chemical.

Look, every chemical can be dangerous or toxic at a high enough exposure level. And similarly, every chemical can be perfectly safe at a low enough level. One molecule of cyanide is not going to harm you, while 200 milligrams of the stuff is gonna kill you. Now, something like vinegar or acetic acid, which everybody has vinegar in their kitchen, and you eat it, something like that is safe to use, putting it on salads and things, but if you take too much of it, it will kill you.