Beauty and the beast: grooming products have a dirty secret

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This article was published 09/09/2019 (2234 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Your makeup is killing you.

So is your toothpaste. And your shampoo. Everything in your daily grooming routine contains unregulated chemicals that are slowly destroying you on a cellular level.

That’s the ugly truth highlighted in Phyllis Ellis’s documentary Toxic Beauty, which premièred at the HotDocs festival earlier this year and now returns to Winnipeg.

The film digs deep into the industry of cosmetics and personal-care products and the results are completely terrifying. Your daily shower will never be the same.

Through a mix of personal stories and scientific evidence, Toxic Beauty follows multiple women who have been impacted in different ways by the chemicals found in the products they used and once believed to be safe.

And those products are not strictly limited to just haircare and makeup: toothpaste, deodorant, skincare and soaps are all shown to contain chemicals that strongly correlate with cellular damage in the human body (not to mention damage to the environment at large).

One of these personal stories is the well-known case of Deane Berg, a woman from South Dakota who sued Johnson & Johnson when she began to suspect that baby powder was the cause of the ovarian cancer that almost killed her. Though her lawsuit was successful, Johnson & Johnson still maintain the product is safe.

An even more emotional story involves former counterintelligence screener Mel Lika, a longtime user of baby powder who, at the time of filming, was living with Stage 4 cancer. Observing her suffering and pain roots in the film in a deeply human place and reminds us what people such as Berg are fighting against — and fighting for.

While baby powder and Johnson & Johnson are the central focus of the documentary, it is only the tip of the iceberg for dangerous chemicals in products marketed as safe by an unregulated capitalist industry.

Mymy Nguyen is a hip, stylish young person about to begin medical school. She recently had a large tumour removed from her breast. Like many young women, Nguyen is a big fan of beauty products. In an experiment, she decides to try “clean” cosmetics and compare the lab results to see just how toxic her go-to products are.

The results are jaw-dropping. The toxins in Nguyen’s body while wearing her regular products place her above the 95th percentile for multiple chemicals. A day later, the “clean” cosmetic show minimal elevation.

The stories serve as links to the bigger issue at hand of unregulated industries flourishing under capitalism at the expense of the consumer — consumers who are most often women.

Simultaneously educational and deeply moving, Toxic Beauty is a galvanizing call to action.

After watching it, I dug through my desk drawer and read the ingredients on the moisturizers I had on hand; 75 per cent of the products contained chemicals listed in the film as known carcinogens. Yikes.

Now excuse me while I run home and clean out my entire makeup drawer.

Frances.Koncan@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @franceskoncan