by Barbara Minton
(The Best Years in Life) Perfume packaging may have flowers, fruit or butterflies on it, but what’s inside is a long way from mother nature. Perfume and the thousands of other scented products created for us to use on our bodies and in our homes get their scent from the more than 3100 chemicals in the arsenal of the fragrance industry. These chemicals are capable of creating tremendous havoc in the human body.
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When perfumes, colognes, body sprays, soaps or other scented products are used, these chemicals are absorbed through the skin and lungs, and enter the blood stream just as surely as if they had been swallowed. Once there, they accumulate in human tissue and breast milk, with these potential results:
*liver toxicity
*nervous system damage
*allergies
*learning disabilities
*brain fog
*obesity
*compromised immune system
*cancer
If you have mysterious nagging health problems that won’t go away, chances are they spring from fragrance and other toxic chemicals that have become ubiquitous in daily life but are hidden from consumers.
What’s hidden in fragrance is mind boggling
Makers of scented products don’t need to disclose their complex cocktails of chemicals, which most of time are made from petrochemicals such as benzene, toluene, xylenes, and methanol. Chemicals from the phthalate family are also found in scented products, and go by such names as di-ethyl phthalate (DEP), and benzyl butyl phthalate. DEP has been linked to developmental abnormalities and learning disabilities in fetuses of exposed mothers. In the creation of fragrances, other unintended toxic chemicals are produced too, such as formaldehyde and dioxin.
Laboratory tests commissioned by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and analyzed by Environmental Working Group (EWG), an organization dedicated to protecting consumers, found as many as 38 secret chemicals hidden in single scented products. The average scented product tested contained 14 secret chemicals not listed on product labels because they are viewed as industry trade secrets. These chemical concoctions are allowed to be designated as simply “fragrance” in the ingredients list.
“This complex mix of clandestine compounds in popular colognes and perfumes makes it impossible for consumers to make informed decisions about the products they consider buying,” says EWG in their article Not So Sexy: Hidden Chemicals in Perfume and Cologne.
The tested products also contained an average of 10 chemicals known to be sensitizers that can trigger allergic reactions such as asthma, wheezing, headaches and contact dermatitis. And a total of 12 different hormone disrupting chemicals were found in the tested products, with the average being four for each product. Six of these chemicals mimic unbalanced estrogen, and a seventh is associated with thyroid disruption.
Of the 91 hazardous ingredients found in the scented products tested, only 19 have been reviewed by Cosmetic Ingredient Review, an industry-funded group, and 27 have been assessed by the International Fragrance Association or the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials, groups that have developed voluntary standards for the chemicals used in fragrance products.