The average woman uses 12 beauty products a day that, taken all together, contain an average of 168 ingredients. The average man uses six products a day accounting for 85 ingredients. Of the tens of thousands of ingredients in our skin and beauty products only a handful have been tested for safety. The FDA currently has virtually no power to regulate the chemicals that go into these products. Consider that the European Union has banned about 1,400 ingredients from cosmetics, yet in our country we have banned 11, and any reasonable consumer has cause for concern. 

An open letter to Congressional Leadership demands that the Senate bring Sens. Dianne Feinstein’s, D-Calif., and Susan Collins’s, R-Maine, Personal Care Products Safety Act to a vote on the Senate floor. While the bill is not perfect, it is a huge step toward making sure that we as consumers know what we are bringing into our homes and introducing to our bodies.

Please read the letter below (originally published by the Environmental Working Group) and if you want to lend your support to the cause, then visit our TAKE ACTION Page and use our one-click tool to send a letter to both your Senators and your Representative asking them to support the Personal Care Products Safety Act  S.1014:

The Honorable Lamar Alexander
United States Senate
455 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-4206

The Honorable Patty Murray
United States Senate
154 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-4704

Dear Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray,

The undersigned personal care product manufacturers, and health and consumer organizations, urge you to build upon the successful bipartisan passage of the Frank R. Lautenberg Chemical Safety for the 21st Century Act by similarly modernizing the regulatory framework for the personal care products industry.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Susan Collins, R-Maine, introduced the Personal Care Products Safety Act, S.1014, which would modernize federal oversight of personal care products. The bill offers common sense reforms that were carefully negotiated among numerous stakeholders, including industry, public health and consumer organizations. This bill has garnered support from industry leaders as well as influential health and consumer organizations.

The Personal Care Products Safety Act strengthens FDA authority to regulate personal care products, addresses questions about the safety of certain ingredients, creates guidance for manufacturers, and would set a national standard for cosmetics oversight.

Each year, FDA would review at least five ingredients to determine their appropriate use in personal care products. The bill would require cosmetic companies to register their manufacturing facilities and products with FDA. It would also require cosmetics companies to report adverse health incidents and give FDA authority to recall dangerous products. Additionally, FDA could require specific labeling and warnings for products that contain ingredients not suitable for the entire population. User fees from companies, totaling $20.6 million a year, would fund the regulatory program.

These commonsense provisions are long overdue. There is no other class of products on the market today that are so widely used by consumers with such few mandatory safeguards. Although men, women and children all use personal care products every day, the federal laws designed to ensure the safety of these products have remained largely unchanged since the late 1930s.

On behalf of our companies, organizations, and the consumers we serve and represent, we urge you to quickly move S.1014, the Personal Care Products Safety Act.

Respectfully,

Au Naturale

Babo Botanicals

California Baby

Earth Mama Angel Baby

EO Products

Hain Celestial Group, Inc.

Johnson & Johnson

Juice Beauty

L'Oreal

Madison Reed

Procter & Gamble

Revlon

The Estee Lauder Companies

Unilever

American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists

American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association

American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network

Endocrine Society

Environmental Working Group

The Gerontological Society of America

Good Housekeeping Institute

March of Dimes

National Alliance for Hispanic Health

National Coalition for LGBT Health

National Psoriasis Foundation

Vietnam Veterans of America

Veterans Health Council

Wellness Warrior

Women Against Prostate Cancer