Vitamin Trader - Healthy Discounts on Quality Vitamins

Match the care and attention you devote to what goes inside your body to what goes on your skin. Reconsider this important subject by reading the book, The Truth About Beauty by Kat James.

A lot of intelligent, self-respecting women would be shocked to know the degree to which they've been duped into accepting cheaply made, irritating concoctions as the cutting edge in skin care. While many may wonder what all those ingredients on labels really are, we tend to set our concerns aside if the packaging, smell, and marketing strike our fancy. But while the term "made with 100 percent pure extracts" can appear on poetic packaging, ingredients may be a plastic, synthetic concoction. Drug and department store brands generally contain only 5 to 8 percent active ingredients, yet ads can go on and on about the effectiveness of those ingredients. And even if they do use the amount proven to have a clinical effect, the rest of what's in the bottle may be a synthetic gravy.

Skin absorption is now widely recognized as a signficant way for substances to enter the body. In some cases it provides even more passage into the bloodsteam than eating or drinking. Some scientists estimate that as much as 60% of what we apply on our skin winds up in our bloodstream.

Government regulation of cosmetic ingredients does not insure safety

Loopholes, delays, appeals, inactions, conflicts of interest, and exemptions ... riddle cosmetic regulation and render it all but useless or worse, since it provides a false sense of security.

One of the major inherent problems with synthesized cosmetic materials is that they tend to be contaminated or form by-products during manufacturing or storage or while on the skin. For example, the cosmetic chemicals listed on labels as TEA, DEA, and MEA or their full names, which end in "amine", like triethanolamine, were found in 1998 by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) to form nitrosamines, which cause cancer in mice. PEG, or polyethylene glycol, a common synthetic emollient, is often contaminated with dioxane, another known hormone disruptor and a carcinogen that the Consumer Product Safety Commission has determined to be dangerous even at low-level exposure. Quaternium-15, a common cosmetic preservative, can release formaldehyde, another carcinogen, and cause skin reactions.

Formaldehyde, widely known to be one of the most dangerous common chemicals, is used in nail polish and in all kinds of synthetic hair, skin, and body care products as an antimicrobial and preservative, but it is never listed on the label as "formaldehyde." It has dozens of aliases (most have the word "form" in it, like formalin, lysoform and formalith), but they're not always listed, since other chemicals can release formaldehyde as a by-product, such as imidazolidinyl urea, a common preservative in shampoos, when they reach certain temperatures.

Analysis has shown that some seriously harmful ingredients are showing up in even the finest perfumes. According to Samuel Epstein, M.D, Professor of Environmental Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Pubic Health, Chicago, a recent analysis of one of the most famous designer perfumes revealed forty-one ingredients, including some known to be toxic to the skin, respiratory tract, and nervous and reproductive systems.

Allergies to fragrance grew more prevalent in the United States from the 1980s to 1990s. In conventional skin and hair products, fragrance is impossible to avoid, since it is allowed even in products labeled "fragrance free." Therefore, we can only knowingly escape from fragrance by using products with essential oil based scents or products that are 100% certified organic.

There is a growing concern about the accumulation of estrogen mimicking chemicals in the breast tissue of women and the prostate tissue of men. Just about every day, a new industrial or cosmetic chemical or chemical combination is found to be one of these hormone disrupting substances. Hormone disruption can cause uterine cell changes, cell proliferation, and other signs of elevated estrogen activity - breast cancer, reproductive, and weight problems.

Each of us has a threshold at which we react not just to any one irritant but also to the number of irritants we are exposed to at a given time. And any additional exposure we encounter once we reach our saturation point could make us suddenly quite sensitive and even chronically sick. For example, formaldehyde, which can be found in all sorts of cosmetics can build up in the body wihout causing acute symptoms before suddenly reaching a saturation point at which a person becomes sensitive to even minute amounts.

The threshold principle also applies to allergic responses. Exposure to sensitizing substances over a long period of time or too many allergens at once can cause a reaction to a substance you may never have reacted to in the past.

A growing number of skin companies are saying no to mass production and warehousing protocol and are giving up vast profits to create biologically active skin and body care products that contain live, unadulterated ingredients. You can find these products in your natural foods stores.