Stacy Malkan

There has been a lot of talk in the news lately about the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics' studies on lipstick and lead. What did the organization discovered?

We looked at 33 red lipsticks in different price ranges that we bought in four U.S. cities. We found that 61% of them contained lead (the L'Oreal product had the highest amount). But 39% of them didn't have detectable levels of lead, which shows it's possible to make lead-free red lipstick.

The cosmetics industry has tried to paint this study as irrelevant, saying that the average person encounters more lead in the water they drink than they do in their lipstick. How do you respond to reasoning like this?

I think it's outrageous to say that because there's more lead in water it doesn't matter if it's in lipstick. What we know about lead is that no amount is safe for kids or pregnant women, so we need to be avoiding all exposures. The fact that lead is also in water and toys makes it even more important that it's not also in lipstick. We want to say to L'Oreal, "Don't you want to do everything you can to protect pregnant women from lead exposure?" I would think they would. It's obviously possible to make lipstick without lead and that's what they all should be doing. Their argument with these chemicals is always the same—it's just a little bit. But the fact is that it's just a little bit of multiple toxic chemicals in many products that we're using every day.

What are some things that people can do to get cosmetics companies to remove toxins from their products?

I think we have a lot of power as consumers just by buying products that are safer and cleaner and letting companies know when you switch brands. It's important to spend our money on safer products and to choose to support companies that are in line with our values. It's also important to call your favorite brand and ask questions and let them know that you have concerns about their ingredients. It does make a difference. We've seen a lot of companies change when they hear from a lot of consumers. And we need to raise our voices politically, to get this issue on the agenda of the national political arena. We have a major problem with consumer products in this country and with chemicals. It's a completely unregulated industry. This is why we're seeing problems like lead in children's toys, formaldehyde in kitchen cabinets, and flame-retardants in mattresses. It's like the Wild West of chemical chaos here. There are no safeguards. Europe is ahead of us as far as having standards and not allowing these things to go on. Our government just has no power to restrict chemicals.

Why are we so far behind in terms of regulations on consumer products?

There's a strong lobby in the US to keep industries unregulated. And there's just a different philosophy at work here, too. When they banned 1,100 chemicals from cosmetics in Europe, what they did was look at that list of chemicals and say "we know these are hazardous, the evidence that they have toxic properties is clear." Then instead of arguing about at what level we can tolerate these chemicals, they just made everyone find a way to make products without them. That's the precautionary approach. In the U.S., we have the prove-harm system. The government or the public has to prove in court beyond a shadow of a doubt that a product causes direct harm before we can regulate it. And that's a standard of proof that can't be attained. A poignant example is that the EPA has only been able to ban five chemicals in the last 30 years, which is when the Toxic Substances Control Act went into effect. The last time they even tried to ban something was a decade ago with asbestos, and they weren't able to provide enough proof in court that that was harmful. And there's an actual disease named after it! The EPA and FDA and Consumer Products Safety Commission, they just don't have the tools or the power to protect consumers from chemical exposure.

Why and when did the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics form?

I moved to Washington D.C. in 2001 and took a job with Healthcare Without Harm. I'm still the communications director for that organization, which is an international coalition that works on reducing the environmental impact of the healthcare industry. I also worked a lot on publicizing the issue of phthalates. Around that time, the Center for Disease Control reported that women had higher levels of phthalates than men. We wondered why that might be. We're all exposed to phthalates through vinyl plastic pretty equally: It's in vinyl shower curtains, car seats, toys, things that are all pretty gender neutral. We thought maybe cosmetics might be the reason why women had higher levels because it's one type of product that women are using more than men. That led us to do some product testing and put together a report called "Not Too Pretty," which came out in 2002. In our studies, we found phthalates in more than 70% of beauty products, in a range of things like shampoo, deodorant, and hair spray. That was really the launch of Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. We saw a need for someone to be looking at cosmetics as a source of chemical exposure. We also wanted to engage in a dialog with the industry about concerns regarding toxic ingredients.

What is one major accomplishment of the organization that you're very proud?

Many companies have phased out what we call the toxic trio of ingredients from nail polish: formaldehyde, toluene and dibutyl phthalate (DBP). These ingredients were widely used when the campaign first started and we've seen a big shift in nail polish ingredients since then. I think this was really important, especially for nail salon workers who are exposed to these chemicals all day, every day. It also shows that the industry can change and is able to change formulations of products relatively quickly without any disruption in the market. We didn't see any price changes or businesses closing or anything like that.

What kinds of harmful ingredients should we try to avoid in our cosmetics?

There is no easy list of things to avoid, but we do have tools available to help answer that question. One of the main tools is the Skin Deep Database (http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/splash.php?URI=%2Findex.php). It's an amazing free resource where consumers can look up products and find out what's in them. There are 25,000 products in the database currently and it rates them for toxicity. You can see where your favorite products fall in the range of toxicity, plus it also points out safer alternatives. A few simple things consumers can try to avoid are: 1. Fragrance, which will reduce a lot of unnecessary and unknown chemical exposures. We think that phthalates are likely to be in a lot of fragrances. 2. Parabens, which are preservatives that have estrogenic properties. They're just used so much and in so many products so we don't know what the total exposure to parabens is. When I looked at all of the products I used as a teen, I was getting about 26 hits of parabens a day. 3. Formaldahyde, also an unsafe preservative. 4. Hydraquinone, a skin lightening ingredient in creams, which is just highly toxic and banned in Europe. It has no place in products.

So should we be throwing out every product we use and buying brand new ones?

I think it's important for people not to feel like you have to run out and change everything right now. That can get so overwhelming. I think it's good just to start by replacing products that we're using a lot of and all the time and all over our bodies, like body lotion, shampoo, deodorant, face creams, and definitely kids products. And we might want to rethink using some things entirely, like bubble bath, which would be something where you're sitting in a warm bath for a long time with potentially much higher exposures to whatever is in those products [because of the skin's increased porosity in reaction to bath temperature].

What is the end goal of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics? Do you hope one day the organization won't be necessary?

I think the end goal is that babies are born toxin-free. In a recent study in 2006, they found 200 chemicals known to be toxic in the umbilical cord blood of babies. I hope there's a day when babies are born toxin-free and that any of us can walk into a store and know that products on the shelves are safe for pregnant women, kids, everyone in the family.

When did you become aware of environmental issues and start adopting greener habits into your life?

The green lifestyle wasn't something I ever really thought about. As a young person growing up in Lynn, Massachusetts, I was something of a makeup diva with lots of products. And I lived in a pretty polluted area as well: There was a large incinerator just a half-mile from my parents' house and tons of oil refineries in nearby Salem. There were lots of environmental issues in that area north of Boston, but we really didn't talk much about them. They just weren't high in people's consciousness. For me, it was a growing awareness as I got older and started to pay attention to politics and read a lot and interview a bunch of people. Then I started to piece together the story on my own about the many pollutants that we're all exposed to. But I did have an "A-ha!" moment with chemicals. When I was a reporter in Colorado, there was an issue that arose over the county's plans to use pesticides on the bike path, which was just unsettling to a lot of people, the idea that this beautiful scenic bike path where kids and pets play would be doused with pesticides as a way to control weeds. I was looking for stories for my newspaper at the time, the Summit Free press, so I went to this community meeting, and about 200 people had shown up. There was just a lot of energy and concern over this issue. The county started out the meeting with this slickly produced video about the great threat to the eco-system of weeds. It was all very dramatic and saying weeds would destroy life as we know it in the high country, but thankfully, there's a happy, safe solution called pesticides. So this video is playing for about 10 minutes at the beginning of this meeting that's already charged because about 200 concerned people from this small community are there. And then when the credits rolled, it showed that the video was produced by Dow and Dupont chemical. People just went crazy. There was yelling in the room, at one point there were tears. I thought, this is a really important story so I spent a good amount of time interviewing town officials and state regulators. I went for a day with the weed guys and learned all about weeds. And I found out they knew a lot about weeds, and they truly were a problem, but they really didn't know anything about the chemicals they were using. They were just sort of repeating the industry line that they were safe.

What does "green" mean to you?

Green to me means safe, healthy and non-toxic. It means chemicals that don't build up in our bodies and breast milk and are safe for the most important population that we need to protect, which are developing babies and small children.

These days there's a lot of trendiness involved in going green. What do you make of that?

What we need to do is make sure green means something. We critically need government standards in place that separate the best companies from the ones that are just marketing the concept green. I think we already have good models for that. We have it in food, where there are strict protocols that go into organic foods and we have legal definitions for the word natural. There's still plenty of room for improvement, of course, but it's a start. We also have a model for the pharmaceutical industry, where companies have to show evidence of efficacy and safety. I think these two things need to happen with chemicals and consumer products, that we're requiring evidence of safety before we put chemicals into commerce.

What is the most recent green habit that you have adopted in your own life?

My car was recently stolen, so I've been driving less. It's kind of nice—my partner and I have been sharing one car between us.