Foundation can feel like your best friend sometimes. From late night dark eye circles to stubborn-to-fade acne spots, your foundation has your back. But if you’ve ever looked into what’s actually in your trusty foundation, we’re going to guess that its ingredients label didn’t read much like English.
As lovely as the cover-up can be, most foundations are filled to the brim with synthetic chemicals – which span the range from mere irritants to more serious carcinogens.
The unfortunate truth is that you’re putting a lot of dangerous stuff on your face, probably daily. Beauty companies are just a little obsessed with using complex, corrosive substances to fill the shoes of something a lot safer but less effective. We’re just now finding out that some of this stuff is actually extremely dangerous for us to use. Efforts have been made to reign in some of these toxins, but a lot more could be done to get this stuff off the shelf.
So what does the foundation you use every day actually contain?
1. Parabens
This is a class of chemicals that gets under your skin and can disrupt your endocrine system. Your body actually detects them as estrogen, and this confuses the hell out of your endocrine system.
The endocrine system is in the business of hormones, which do most of the work around your body. Therefore, if your endocrine system is disrupted by these little pests, pretty much everything around your body will be thrown off. From your mood to your metabolism and sexual function, it’s kind of scary how much these chemicals can affect. Spotting a paraben is fairly easy since it usually has –paraben at the end of it. Hey, at least they’re honest.
2. Coal Tar Dyes
Coal tar – and the dyes derived from it – is a mesh of different chemicals and compounds, none of which are particularly good for you. Depending on the brand or supplier, coal tar could contain a number of different toxic heavy metals. Additionally, short-term exposure to a compound called p-phenylenediamine found in coal tar dyes can cause eye irritation, vertigo and asthma.
Coal tar dyes mostly get into your bloodstream through the pores in your skin, meaning that they’re particularly dangerous in foundations.
3. Butylated Hydroxyanisole
More commonly known as BHA, butylated hydroxyanisole is well-known for causing allergic skin reactions, from rashes to full-out chemical burns. There’s some evidence that it’s a carcinogenic (something that contributes towards causing cancer) but there isn’t enough research as of yet to stick that label on it.
What we can say about it, though, is that it’s an endocrine disruptor just like parabens – seeping in through your pores and messing with the hormones that keep you running. It’s also known to be toxic to fish, not unlike fertilizers used on farms.
4. Butylated Hydroxytoluene
Sometimes thought of as a non-identical twin to BHA, butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT) is another toxin you need to look out for. There’s been a lot of tests done on rats and other animals so far, and we know that in high doses it can kill them. In those experiments, it affects the thyroid gland, the kidneys and the lungs first.
A separate vein of research that’s still in its infancy suggests that BHT could also be disguising itself as estrogen once it gets into the blood stream. Apart from messing up your endocrine system, this also prevents the body from making testosterone. Whilst that might not seem like a big thing for women, testosterone is essential for proper sexual functioning, so you need at least some testosterone in your body for everything to go smoothly.
5. Ethylene Oxide-Based Compounds
Just finding out that ethylene oxide, a chemical you’re likely to find in foundation, has been known to contribute towards breast cancer is probably enough to turn you off the stuff. But for some reason, somebody thought it was a good idea to mix a bunch of other chemicals- usually dangerous in their own rights, because hey, this is mass-produced synthetic foundation we’re talking about here – to create yet another known carcinogen called 1,4-dioxane.
Picking out ethylene oxide-based compounds is a bit of a chore because there’s so many of them and they all have drastically different names, but it’s more than likely that anything with ‘eth’, ‘ethyl’ or the initials ‘PEG’ is going to have ethylene oxide in it somewhere.
We’re going to level with you – this stuff is scary and hard to process. But keep in mind that we’re not talking about all foundations to ever exist. There are several natural cosmetic brands that are actively pushing against the constraints of the common model and playing in a different sandbox.
If you want to rid yourself of these chemicals for good, give a natural foundation a go. Not only do they do the job as well as their paraben-laden counterparts, but many of them actually benefit your skin.
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