OConnor - No More Dirty Looks: the Truth about Your Beauty Products--and the Ultimate Guide to Safe and Clean Cosmetics

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Table of Contents

Advance Praise for NO MORE DIRTY LOOKS

This book is a wake-up call for all women who think that what you put on your body is not going to hurt you. OConnor and Spunt offer an in-depth glimpse into the dangers lurking within the beauty industry, in a quick and engaging read that is tough to put down. No More Dirty Looks will arm consumers with knowledge, opening their eyes to products they should avoid and safer, healthier alternatives. Every woman I know is getting a copy.

Kim Barnouin, coauthor of the
#1 New York Times best-seller Skinny Bitch

I loved this book! No More Dirty Looks is a fabulous and enlightening guide to the cleanest skin, body, and hair care products. It belongs in every womans library and should be required reading for all skin and hair professionals!

Ann Louise Gittleman, Ph.D., New York Times
best-selling author of The Fat Flush Plan

No More Dirty Looks can save you from many toxic ingredients in cosmetics. Authors OConnor and Spunt open a wide window to a world where personal care products and safety can co-exist and give you a better result with less pain and danger. The book reads as if the authors are talking with your bodyfrom head to toe.

Ralph Nader

The Truth about
Your Beauty Products
and the Ultimate Guide to
Safe and Clean Cosmetics

Why Were Coming Clean

THE BLOWOUT

It started with a $400 promise. Get the Brazilian blowouta fancy new keratin hairstyling treatmentand wed have perfectly straight, wash-and-go hair for up to two months. This was a couple of years ago, at a time when we both had higher-paying jobs and less level heads. So we went to a posh West Hollywood salon, plopped down into comfy leather chairs, and flipped through tabloids as a mysterious solution was flat-ironed onto our hair. Our eyes watered and the backs of our throats burned, but we barely flinched when the salon offered us protective goggles.

Two teary-eyed hours later, we both had shiny, immaculately straight hairidentical in fact, save for the color. When wed woken up that morning, our hair could not have been more different: Siobhans was long, thick, and blonde; Alexandra had a mass of brown curls. Now we looked like Betty and Veronica. As we ran our fingers through our pin-straight locks, we were amazed. It was so... pretty. And straight. And stinky.

That evening, over french fries and white wine, we nicknamed our dos toxic mol for their distinctly unorganic cocoa smell. Instructed to not wash or pin back our hair for forty-eight hours, we would have to get used to it, a sacrifice in the name of delightfully manageable hair.

As the weeks wore on and the stench wore off, our hair was a daily delight. We found the summer humidity tolerable and were happy that our morning routines had been halved. Still, something wasnt sitting right. Were both skeptics by nature and journalists by trade, and this feat of nature started seeming a little, well, unnatural. It would only be a matter of time before something clicked. A matter of time, or a matter of seriously shitty-looking hair, which is what happened next.

The shine had gone matte, our ends were decimated, and we had crowns of flyaways that were most certainly not there before. It was this comedown off the perfect-hair high that fueled our curiosity; we became intent on tracking down just what was in that mysterious solution. Thats when the research began and the panic set in. It started with basic Googling (which is never a good idea when youre feeling nervous). We found an article about a woman whod died days after a similar treatment, asphyxiated by the noxious fumes. As it turns out, the magic ingredient in our lovely Brazilian blowout was not keratin after all.

Before long, we were poring over decades worth of scientific studies and learning the unfamiliar language of chemistry, one fourteen-letter word at a time. At first, it raised more questions than it answered: Why on earth would a beauty treatment contain a known carcinogen? How is that even legal? We considered that it may be an exception to the rule: one rogue company in an otherwise safeguarded industry that was taking advantage of our vanity. But as we dug further, we opened up a Pandoras box of bad news.

We began studying the ingredient lists of our shampoos, our bronzers, our body lotions, and our nail polishes. We noticed a lot of the same words over and over againpropylene glycol, methylparaben, fragranceso we looked them up in medical-research databases. We learned that in addition to the noxious chemicals in our pricey blowouts, there were sketchy ingredients in just about everything we usedfrom our daily shampooing to our biweekly manicures. We also learned that only 11 percent of the 10,500 ingredients determined by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to be in use by the cosmetics industry have been tested for safety by a publicly accountable agency. Of the ones we do know about, some are flat-out dangerous to our health, others are questionable at best, and most are doing almost nothing to improve the quality, feel, and health of our skin and hair. So not only are these products wreaking some unspeakable havoc on our bodies, theyre also making us look worse.

What a drag, we thought. Like most women, we had an arsenal of products we swore by. Wed given these brands our trust (and our money) for years. But then something incredible happened. As we started switching to clean beauty products, we began to feel and see a difference in our appearances. And it was a good difference. Our skin was clearer, our hair calmed downwe even smelled better once we found a decent natural deodorant.

It makes sense: the bottom line for most businesses is just thatthe bottom line. Large cosmetics companies have huge product runs that must be able to withstand years on the shelf and remain stable in all kinds of climates and conditions. This kind of manufacturing is not always going to be about supplying you with the highest-quality, most beautifying ingredients for your buck. So they pad their products with cheap, widely accepted fillers, and spend the big coin on marketing campaigns.

But its not as though they dont know the science. Theyve read the same reports we have, and then some. So why are they selling us these things? In the words of one industry scientist whose employer charges $250 for a 2-ounce pot of face cream, Because we can.

OUTSIDEIN

Skin is a moody organ, finicky about what it lets in and what it keeps out. Yes, it is a protective layer, which is why when you spill water on yourself, you dont melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. At the same time, our dermis does let in lots of other things we put on itas much as 60 percent, by some accounts.

If youve ever tried to quit smoking, you may be familiar with the nicotine patch. If you were lucky, it gave you Technicolor dreams and curbed your cigarette cravings by supplying you with a steady flow of nicotine. The patch can do that thanks to transdermal absorption, an effective way of getting all kinds of things right into your bloodstream. Skin is a popular delivery route for many medications, precisely because its so direct. Think about that. Now think about how much you put on your skin, and how often.

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