Skin Deep

The Environmental Working Group has created Skin Deep, a

. . . personal care product safety guide with in-depth information on 14,229 products - 988 brands of lotion, lip balm, deodorant, sunscreen and other popular products - and the 6,921 ingredients that form them. With its core of 37 toxicity and regulatory databases, Skin Deep provides safety ratings and brand-by-brand comparisons that can help consumers choose safer products. EWG’s reason for developing Skin Deep is that the government cannot mandate safety studies of cosmetics, and only 11 percent of the 10,500 ingredients FDA has documented in products have been assessed for safety by the cosmetic industry's review panel.

It’s not a bad product. You can search by brand name or product type, and there is a ranking from “highest concern” to “lowest concern” products. Skin Deep’s highest concern product is a relaxer (a hair conditioning product) provides a good example of how the site works. EWG provides a pretty complete, though highly conservative, screening of the potential health hazards associated with the ingredients in each product.

For example, the ingredient cocamide DEA (or coconut diethanolamide), a surfactant used in shampoos, body washes and conditioners, is identified to have “thought to cause cancer in humans basd on limited data”. In checking this out, I found that the National Toxicology Program has completed a lifetime topical application (skin exposure) cancer bioassay for cocamide DEA. NTP concluded cocamide DEA produced “clear evidence of carcinogenicity” in mice, both sexes at doses of 0, 50 mg/kg and 100 mg/kg, and “no evidence of carcinogenicity” in male rats, and “equivocal evidence of carcinogenicity” in female rats at doses of 0, 100 mg/kg and 200 mg/kg. These descriptions are in quotes because they are NTP terms of art. So, this is probably a pretty fair description of the cancer hazard of the product.

EWG also raises some concern about cocamide DEA for being a nitrosating agent that can form carcinogenic nitrosamines if mixed with amines. I can not confirm this one – and nitrosamines form as a result of the reaction of amines with sodium nitrite used as a preservative, which doesn’t look anything like the chemistry of cocamide DEA (I hesitate to say EWG has this one wrong, but I am now curious about what their backup is for that statement). Carcinogenic nitrosamines are a concern in personal care products, because diethanolamine may be present and thus might be a source for nitrosamines.

Chemical in your microenvironment may be meaningful sources of exposures, as indicated by this recent paper on phthalate urinary metabolite concentrations and personal care product use. This site is informative for identifying the chemicals in personal care products, and providing some limited information for identifying potential hazards. You would need to go elsewhere to find more assessment of the relevance of these identified hazards to human health. However, it doesn’t seem that those charged with risk assessment for cosmetic products are moving very fast (at least for surfactants). In response, Skin Deep is very much a precautionary response to the uncertainties in our understanding of the risks associated with ingredients in personal care products. If you’re interested in not taking chances, Skin Deep may be useful for you as a buying guide for personal care products.

A couple of suggestions would make this a more usable web site. First, provide CAS numbers which would make it easier to find information on the various chemicals. Finding an unambiguous description of cocamide DEA (alkanolamide of coconut oil fatty acids and diethanolamine, CASRN 68603-42-9) took a little time. Second, provide some more links to the data used to develop the rankings. The methodology used in ranking the various products can be found here.