We live in a time where checking the label on the back of your products is not something you do strictly in the grocery store. People are becoming more aware and conscious of the products they are using in and on their bodies, and the health and beauty industry is changing.
However, some things never change. There are a few specifics you probably don’t know about your health and beauty products. In the spirit of learning more about how your health and beauty products are made, sold, marketed, and actually work, check out a brief look into some surprising facts about your favorite products:
The FDA is a regulator of the health and beauty industry
The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (or FDA) is one of the agencies that oversee the safety of health and beauty products in the states, but the lack of oversight is negligible at best.
If you visit the FDA’s website, you’ll see that they are fairly blatant about how little they actually “police” the chemicals used in popular health and beauty products.
The United States has banned a total of eleven ingredients from being used in beauty products, while there are currently 1,300 banned toxic ingredients in Europe.
Also, many popular health and beauty products are put through a large nitrogen processing regimen called nitrogen inerting to keep the ingredients from “going bad” before the product is purchased. If your health and beauty products have to be “preserved,” it would make sense for the FDA to take a more prominent role in ensuring their safety.
Natural doesn’t always mean natural
An added lack of regulation also applies to the words natural, herbal, and organic. Health and beauty producers can slap these words on their labels as a marketing ploy, and there’s not much that will likely be done about their gross misrepresentation.
When you’re inspecting the labels of your health and beauty products, understand that the ingredients are listed from most concentrated to least. If you see a special “natural” ingredient marketed on the label, check the ingredients list for the actual placement of that ingredient.
If the ingredient in question is down towards the bottom of the list, then you can be sure that there’s not much of that “natural” ingredient used in the making of the product.
Hypoallergenic and noncomedogenic are marketing terms
While the product you are purchasing may actually be hypoallergenic or non comedogenic, there is still no regulation on the use of the terms in health and beauty. In theory, a company could say that their soaps are hypoallergenic, when in reality they have no tangible evidence to support the statement.
As you can see, it’s important to read the labels on your beauty products. Do you read the labels? Let us know in the comments below!
