The Beauty Industry: It’s Starting to Get Ugly

According to NPD, total US personal care and beauty product sales exceeded $42 billion in 2007, and due to the economy, Euromonitor predicted that figure would decline $1 billion between 2007 and 2012, with sales slipping 0.4% on average per year.

Still, it is a huge market.

Kantar Media pegged US personal care advertising spending at over $5.5 billion in 2009.

Nevertheless, the vast health and beauty industry is now under attack.

The efficacy of many health and beauty care products has long been questioned, and increasingly their toxicity is under scrutiny.

On its website, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (CSC) claims: “Major loopholes in US federal law allow the $50 billion cosmetics industry to put unlimited amounts of chemicals into personal care products with no required testing, no monitoring of health effects and inadequate labeling requirements. In fact, cosmetics are among the least-regulated products on the market.”

Under existing law, the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act of 1938, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no power to require cosmetics companies to conduct safety assessments and can not require product recalls. Unlike in the EU, where the use of 1100 chemicals and additives are banned or controlled in beauty products, the US has banned only 11 ingredients.

To protest, this week the CSC partnered with Annie Leonard, creator of The Story of Stuff, to release “The Story of Cosmetics” to alert consumers to the dangers of beauty product ingredients and warn them not to trust the government to take care for their safety.

The animation pulls no punches, naming a number of major beauty product manufacturers.

This week, US Congressional Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) introduced legislation to toughen safety standards for cosmetics, including requiring regular government testing of products for hazardous ingredients. Representatives Edward Markey (D-MA) and Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) are co-sponsoring the bill.

In light of the fact that there is lead in lipstick, formaldehyde in bath products for babies and skin-lightening creams have been found to contain high amounts of mercury, while the FDA admitted it had not tested skin creams for mercury in years, changes in the system are overdue.

“Consumers can’t assume even when an ingredient has been banned that it’s not in a product,” Ms. Schakowsky told the Chicago Tribune. “That’s a really, really important finding.”

In addition, as consumers have come to realize that major health and beauty companies presented themselves as champions against breast cancer in advertising—while using carcinogens in their product, there has been a “pinkwashing” backlash.

If the health and beauty industry does not clean up its act, Congress and consumers may do it for them.