I think it was my sophomore year in college when I realized I preferred the fifteen extra minutes of beauty sleep to the fifteen minutes I spent trying to wrangle my face into some semblance of glamour for my 8 a.m. lectures in postmodern literary theory.
It’s a habit that stuck. To this day, many moons on, I still opt for the extra sleep, reserving my cosmetic efforts for special occasions on which a dress and a pair of heels are also in the mix. All this time, I thought I was simply sparing myself the hassle of being overly vain, but, as it turns out, I may have been sparing myself from cancer and infertility as well.
Fun with Phthalates
The average American woman uses up to twelve products a day. Think about it: soap, shampoo, conditioner, and other hair products of all kinds, cleanser, moisturizers for every part of the body, deodorant, a veritable artist’s palette of makeup, fragrance (both the kind that resides in your products and the kind you spritz on as a finishing touch). On average, those twelve products contain up to 180 chemicals.
These chemicals appear in different combinations in different cosmetic products; some of them, in small doses, do not have any proven ill effect on your overall health. However, there are plenty that reportedly do. The chemical criminals lurking in your everyday beauty products include mercury, lead acetate, formaldehyde (yes, the stuff coroners use to embalm corpses), toluene, petroleum distillates (petroleum, as in the oil byproduct), coal tar, and phthalates.
I know a carcinogen when I see one, but what’s a phthalate? Anything with that many consonants in a row can’t be good for you. According to AmericanChemistry.com, phthalates are “a family of compounds whose primary use is as a vinyl softener. They are colorless, oily liquids with little or no odor and low volatility.” Phthalates are what keep your perfume fragrant for the whole day or keep that salon-fresh scent wafting from your hair hours after you shampoo, among other things.
