Annette Rubin - Belli Beautiful: The Essential Guide to the Safest Health and Beauty Products for Pregnancy, Mom, and Baby

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Table of Contents

This book is dedicated to the strongest
and most beautiful women we knowmoms!

Foreword

by Jason Rubin, MD

About twelve years ago, when my wife Annette became pregnant with our first son, she asked me about the safety of different topical ingredients while expecting. She was using about ten skin care and twelve cosmetic products a day, each with over a dozen different ingredients, and she wanted to know which of those chemicals were okay and which she should try to avoid. My first thought was that the skin care companies were probably being very cautious with their ingredient choices. Physicians have known for decades that chemicals in creams and lotions can pass through the skin and enter the bloodstream. Surely the skin care industry wouldnt ignore the risks of topical absorption and the possible effects on the growing baby during pregnancy.

Out of curiosity, I started calling around to different companies and asking questions. Are your ingredients safe for pregnancy? Are they absorbed through the skin? How do you know for sure? I was shocked by the answers. All of the companies I spoke with said that their products were safe during pregnancy because they werent absorbed, but they couldnt point to any research that backed up this claim. Nobody was screening the ingredients for links to birth defects or miscarriages. The experience had me wondering: what does safe really mean? In a world where our medical knowledge is constantly evolving, product safety is a moving target. Ingredients that we think are perfectly harmless today could be shown in research tomorrow to cause cancer, birth defects, or Alzheimers disease. Or what about a medication that causes a serious side effect in 0.001 percent of the population? Most of us would consider this drug harmlessbut not the handful of people who end up in the hospital after using it. Its enough to make you wonder: can we really say that anything is completely safe?

They say that medicine is an art as well as a science. Thats definitely true. Physicians use research studies to learn more about the science behind the human body, but our understanding of its complex systems will never be complete. And thats where the art comes inour job is to balance the many gaps in our knowledge with a patients need for safe, sound advice.

We learn so much during medical school, but three pieces of wisdom have always stuck out in my mind. First, do no harm. Second, all bleeding stopseventually. (Surgeons have a very strange sense of humor.) And third: when in doubt, always err on the side of caution.

I use each of these rules in my medical practice each day. The easiest visits are the ones where its perfectly obvious what the problem is and which treatment is needed: fractures need splinting, lacerations need suturing, and heart attacks need quick medications and a rapid transfer to the cath lab. Its the other visits that keep me from sleeping at nightthe diagnostic dilemmas for which there are dozens of possible explanations but no certainty about which one is right, even with all the expensive labs, X-rays, and other imaging studies.

When Im seeing adult patients, Im able to explain all the risks and benefits of each choice so the patient can make an informed decision. With children, however, the rules change. Children cant explain their symptoms very well, so I have to wonder there may be more going on. Im even more cautious with infants and newbornstheir little bodies are so fragile. Adults can accept a certain amount of risk in their lives, but we try not to take any chances when it comes to babies. Ill send an adult home with an unexplained fever and give him a few tablets of Tylenol, but Ill admit a two-month-old baby to the local childrens hospital for the exact same thing. It just makes sense to be more careful with little ones, and thats especially true for the developing fetus during pregnancy. Their bodies are so tiny that even a small chemical exposure could be hazardous.

The more Annette and I thought about it, the more we realized that the world needs a higher safety standard for skin care products during pregnancyone that errs on the side of caution. That was the moment when my wife and I realized that, as a beauty industry professional and a physician, we could make a real difference in peoples lives. We could formulate a medically responsible line of skin care products for new moms and their babies. And thats when our company, Belli, was born.

Research moves slowly. There are so many chemicals to study, and most of the research dollars go to new medications. Theres little push to study the safety of skin care ingredients that have been around for a while. When a research study does show that a cosmetic ingredient causes a birth defect, doctors often dont know what to do because most such experiments are done on animalswe cant say for sure that the same thing would happen in humans. At Belli, rather than wait for a topical ingredient to be proven harmful beyond doubt, we thought a more cautious approach would be for pregnant women to start avoiding questionable ingredients much sooner, when the first link to a birth defect or miscarriage has appeared in a published medical study, involving animals or humans, at any dose, and through any method of absorption. And thus Bellis teratology screening process was born.

Annette and I love what we created together at Belli, and we get really excited whenever we start working on a new product. There are always newer, more effective ingredients around the corner and new safety research thats yet to be uncovered! I keep track of all the latest medical research, and I update our formulations to stay ahead of the curve. But even so, every once in a while Im asked a question that makes me think twice about a certain ingredient choice. I think thats great! Neither our products nor our information will ever be perfect, but thats part of the art of medicine toocaring enough to try.

I have learned so much about skin care safety over the last decade, especially as it relates to expecting moms and babies. Since there could never be enough space on the side of a cosmetic box to share all of this vital information, Annette, Melissa, and I are thrilled to be able to offer it in this book. With Melissas passion for writing about beauty and our passion for understanding the safety of health and beauty products, we knew that the partnership was right. We hope this book will empower you to make smart choices each time you shop for skin care products. Whether its our brand or another that we recommend, we want every woman to feel beautiful throughout pregnancyand also to enjoy peace of mind.

Introduction

We are unabashed beauty fanatics. Were both skin care geeks who actually look forward to washing our faces at night. We love discovering the latest and greatest products on the market, and we have the careers to prove it: for decades, weve each been working in the beauty industry, learning about it from the inside out, Annette as a product innovator and Melissa as an editor and journalist. This book was propelled by our passion for beauty combined with our love of motherhood.

For both of us, entering pregnancy changed our relationship with beauty. We started taking a closer look at the personal care products we had always used and loved. Suddenly we didnt care as much about the beautiful packaging, the way they smelled, or the promises they made about evening out our skin tones and diminishing our crows feet. We both asked a far more important questionwhat ingredients were in these potions anyway? From our shampoos to our lotions, our nail polish to our lipstick, we wanted our products not only to deliver results but to be safe for us and for our growing babies.

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