What is in your morning bathroom routine? Most likely, you take a shower with a zesty, invigorating shower gel; you shampoo and condition your hair; you wash and maybe scrub your face with a foaming fresh-smelling cleanser; if you are a man, you also shave. You splash your skin with a toner or an astringent, top it with a moisturizer with (hopefully) some sunscreen in it, followed by makeup (again, optional), some antiperspirant under your arms, and a spritz of a fragrance to seal the deal. Within fifteen minutes, you have exposed yourself to a whopping amount of chemicals—and you haven't even left home yet!

After a quick count of ingredients contained in a typical cleanser, toner, moisturizer, eye cream, facial scrub, body wash, body lotion, and a sunscreen, I came up with more than two hundred different chemicals that we diligently apply to our skin daily. This is not counting hundreds of synthetic fragrance ingredients in your favorite eau de toilette! As you leave your home, you will inhale car emissions, pesticides, radon, volatile organic compounds, persistent organic pollutants, tobacco smoke, dust, and microscopic droplets of grease. You will eat food that contains artificial preservatives, flavors, and colors, and you will drink water that has subpar purity standards, adding to the already brewing cocktail of chemicals that enter your system nonstop.

In 2006, a consumer advocacy group, Environmental Working Group, with the support of the Breast Cancer Fund, Breast Cancer Action, and the National Environmental Trust, released a study of the listed ingredients for 7,500 bestselling beauty products. Here are some of the findings:

  • The Cosmetic Ingredient Review Board, a panel that oversees cosmetic safety, has never analyzed about 90 percent of cosmetic ingredients for health impacts.
  • More than seventy popular hair dye products contain ingredients derived from coal tar, a known carcinogen.

Nearly 55 percent of products contain "penetration enhancers" that increase the ability of chemicals to enter the bloodstream.

Our skin eats anything that we put on its surface. When you use beauty products loaded with chemical ingredients, you are feeding your skin "junk food." I bet you already know that junk food, with all its flavor enhancers, preservatives, synthetic fillers and highly processed ingredients, is not good for our bodies. If you try eat healthfully, why use "junk beauty"?