By Jennifer Huget
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 22, 2004; Page HE01

You're already counting calories or carbs, measuring your weight and your BMI, monitoring your blood pressure and cholesterol. Do you really need another health-related number to reckon with?

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit public-interest research group known for making connections between chemical exposure and adverse health conditions, thinks you may. The Washington-based organization has made it easy to calculate your risk of exposure to potentially harmful substances through the personal care products you use. In its new "Skin Deep" study, funded by the Heinz Family Foundation, the Beldon Fund and the John Merck Fund, EWG uses a complex formula to assign a health-risk rating to each of 7,500 personal-care products.

In EWG's assessment, Just For Men Brush-In Color Gel for Mustache, Beard & Sideburns, Natural Real Black merits a whopping 9.5 score (on a scale of 0 to 10, the top end reflecting the highest risk). Rite Aid Pure Baby Oil comes in for a tiny 1.1 rating. In between are Crest Rejuvenating Effects Liquid Gel Toothpaste (4.3) and Speed Stick Deodorant Solid, Fresh Scent at 5.3. EWG says all those products impose a cumulative chemical load about which too little is known.

The rating system offers a means of quantifying the answer to a controversial question: Just what are we doing to ourselves when we slather stuff on our bodies? At first blush, the numbers may scare you. Dig deeper and you'll find much that could temper your fear -- or, depending on your point of view, fire your temper.

People like Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) applaud EWG's work, saying it's time for the cosmetics industry to change. "Consumers need better information about the ingredients used in their personal care products," said DeGette. "Providing consumers with better access to this information is an important first step."

EWG itself encourages a moderate response to the data. EWG project director Jane Houlihan says Skin Deep's findings are "cause for concern, but not alarm."

Calculating Risk

Finding your cosmetics risk rating is easy and even kind of fun: Just go to the "Skin Deep" report (www.ewg.org/reports/skindeep/) and type in the brand name of your deodorant, toothpaste, soap, shampoo and whatever else you use. (EWG research shows the typical adult uses nine such products per day.) The site will tell you how many ingredients the products collectively contain (the average adult load is 126 unique chemicals, says EWG), and rate the aggregate health threat those ingredients may pose.

Each product is ranked according to its ingredients' potential to cause cancer, trigger allergic reactions, interfere with the endocrine (hormonal) system, impair reproduction or damage a developing fetus; any harmful impurities in the product are also considered. Containing unstudied ingredients or a "penetration enhancer" that helps chemicals get absorbed through the skin also enter into the equation, as does any violation of industry safety recommendations surrounding its use.

By FDA regulation, items whose ingredients haven't been shown to be safe are supposed to say so on their labels. According to the EWG, none of the products in the Skin Deep database bore such a label, despite the fact that 356 products contained ingredients for which the CIR had insufficient data to support their safe use in cosmetics.

Other products draw EWG's fire for containing ingredients that are used in ways other than those dictated by the CIR. For instance, Pond's Clear Solutions Overnight Blemish Reducers -- which are applied directly to the skin -- pull an 8.8 rating for containing butyl methacrylate, a substance for which CIR's instructions are to "avoid skin contact."

The study "revealed major gaps in the regulatory safety net for consumers," Houlihan said. "When only 11 percent of the ingredients in personal care products have been assessed, that leaves a large room for unknown risk." Houlihan said the EWG is particularly concerned about the risks posed by cosmetics ingredients over time and in combinations.

Acknowledging that in this case something "fell through the cracks," Houlihan says the inconsistency will be addressed in updated versions of the report.

In the end, the study's main message is less about what we know can hurt us than about the vast universe of unknowns. The rating system yields high numbers not only for products whose chemical makeup is likely to do harm but for those containing lots of possibly benign ingredients that consumers have no way of distinguishing from the nasty stuff. A product label listing "silica," for example, gives the consumer no guidance as to whether the ingredient is the carcinogenic crystalline silica or another form of the substance not thought to cause harm.

A week after releasing its "Skin Deep" report, the EWG petitioned the FDA to, among other things, order recalls of cosmetics that contain ingredients that haven't been established as safe and yet don't carry a warning label. It has also asked the agency to require manufacturers to stop using ingredients that contain toxic impurities or that might combine with other ingredients to form such impurities.