M2.4 Blog Assignment: Personal Care Products

After watching both videos, I became more skeptical of the toxicity and safety of the personal care products I use everyday. Both videos emphasized that we are using 12 personal care products a day (men generally use less), and are being exposed to at least 175 chemicals from personal care products alone. This is especially alarming since less than 20% of the chemicals have been tested for safety. With that said, the issue seems to be a lack of regulations. Companies are not required to state all the chemical ingredients that are being used in their products. As both videos stated, the 1938 Food, Drugs, and Cosmetics Act and the 1976 Toxics Substances Control Act are both outdated in which many of the chemicals that were allowed have been shown to be detrimental to our health. The Safe Chemical Act of 2010 should provide more safeguards regarding these hormone disruptors and cancer causing chemicals. The second video provided studies that noted the many detrimental health issues, potentially from the chemicals in our personal care products. but as noted, these are correlations in which there is not "one smoking gun" that causes these health issues.

This module gave me more insight into the lack of regulations there are on our personal care products. It is concerning to see that there has not been a drastic governmental intervention on the current policies that allow these chemicals to be used and exposed to everyone on a regular basis. It was always easy to trust the products that are out there, and to overlook the warning labels on these products; but after learning the information from both these videos, I believe I will be more conscientious when shopping for my personal care products.