CHANGING HAABITTS: Makeup as a Model for Building Material Safety

Did you know that current federal laws do not require cosmetic products and ingredients (with the exception of color additives) to gain FDA approval before they are available for purchase on the shelves of your local pharmacy?  That’s right, folks: your favorite moisturizer, perfume, lipstick, nail polish and face makeup may contain any number of harmful substances that have not been reviewed by the FDA for safety (or efficacy).  It’s discouraging to think that, with all of the changes you might be making to your home environment to limit your family’s exposure to toxins, what’s lurking in your vanity drawers might be working against you.

Current federal regulations place the burden of disclosing product ingredients and ensuring their safety on cosmetic manufacturers, requiring no third party testing to validate claims of safety or efficacy.  Is that news to you, too?  For ages, we assumed that the government was somehow safeguarding us against the harmful substances in the products we use most frequently and intimately.  But the truth is that cosmetic manufacturers can include almost any chemical ingredient in their formulations without a federally-regulated formal review or testing process.

As if worrying about harmful chemicals in our indoor environments wasn’t enough, we’re also keeping tabs on the progress of proposed legislation that would better regulate toxins in our cosmetics and personal care products.  In late 2015, Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced a proposed bill called the Personal Care Products Safety Act that would compel the FDA to better regulate harmful ingredients in the products we use everyday.  Now cosponsored by Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), the proposed legislation seeks to establish a safety review process for cosmetic ingredients, and would give the FDA further power to protect consumer safety in the realm of personal care products.  

The Personal Care Products Safety Act would mandate that cosmetic manufacturers register with the FDA and adhere to reporting and disclosure guidelines that would restrict harmful products on the cosmetic marketplace.  The proposed legislation could also allow the FDA to recall products with proven harmful ingredients if manufacturers refuse to do so of their own accord.    

According to Feinstein: “Despite the universal use of these products, none of their ingredients have been independently evaluated for safety. This puts consumers’ health at risk and we urgently need to update the nearly 80-year-old safety rules.”

Tell your senators you support consumer safety, both in the cosmetics realm and on the homefront when it comes to the regulation of harmful substances in our building materials.  We’re watching this piece of legislation as a model for making the disclosure of building material ingredients and their health implications more transparent to consumers, designers and builders alike.  We need better regulation of harmful substances on the building materials market, and seeing progress on parallel fronts like this one tells us that it’s possible!