Dangers in the Beauty Industry

This week we discuss dangers in the beauty industry.  From a client's perspective, the issues might not be as severe, but the clinicians who must deal with chemicals day in and day out are at a greater risk. 

The average woman uses 12 different beauty products every day — cleansers, conditioners, hair dyes, fragrances, skin care products, scented lotions, nail polish, and makeup, to name a few. Take a quick glance at the labels, and you'll see a cocktail of chemical components.

You might assume that all these ingredients have been tested to ensure that they're safe for long-term use. That's not the case.

At least on the federal level, no one is checking to make sure that the chemicals you're putting on your body are harmless. "Products are tested to make sure they don't cause short-term problems, such as skin irritation. But they're not tested for long-term safety," says Dr. Kathryn M. Rexrode, associate professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Women's Health at Harvard Medical School. The FDA steps in only if people actually complain about a product because they suspect it harmed them. Prior to that, the onus is on the company alone.

​​"Just because it's on your shelf doesn't mean that it's safe," says Tamarra James-Todd, the Mark and Catherine Winkler Assistant Professor of Environmental Reproductive and Perinatal Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. With this in mind, women should take some time to consider what they're putting on their bodies each day and how it could potentially affect their health, she says.

​Hair dye and breast cancer

There's reason for concern about many of the chemicals in popular personal care products on the market today. Case in point: a study published online Dec. 3, 2019, by the International Journal of Cancer found a link between hair dye and breast cancer. Women in the study who used permanent hair dye at least once in the 12-month period leading up to the study had a 9% higher risk of developing breast cancer than women who didn't use hair dye. And when the study authors broke the findings down by race, they found an even higher risk for African American women. Women in that group who used any permanent dye in the previous 12 months had a 45% higher risk of developing breast cancer compared with women who did not use hair dye. It didn't seem to matter how often or for how many years the women had used the dye.

The findings were not surprising, says James-Todd. "We conducted a study a year ago in which we saw similar findings for hair dyes," she says. Some hair care products contain more than 5,000 chemicals, including some known to disrupt the body's natural hormone balance or to have cancer-causing effects in animals, according to study authors. Even so, studies looking at hair dyes in the past have been a mixed bag, with some finding links between health problems and dye use, and others finding no link. The differences found in more recent studies, says James-Todd, may be due to the fact that they are testing different products. Today's products use different chemicals than older formulations, which were not linked to health risks in some previous studies.

​Analyzing the study results

Authors of the 2019 study drew on data from the Sister Study, which enrolled more than 50,000 women — the healthy sisters of women with breast cancer — ages 35 to 74. The study ran from 2003 to 2009 and used questionnaires, which were updated every three years. The surveys included questions about how often women used hair dye, as well as what colors and types of dye they used and whether it was permanent or semi-permanent. The study also used information gathered about other hair products, specifically chemicals used to straighten hair. The average follow-up period for the study was a little over eight years, and the current analysis included information gathered through 2016.

The analysis also linked hair straightening products to a higher risk of breast cancer. These chemical products were associated with an 18% higher risk of breast cancer in women who used them in the 12 months before the study period. The more often women used straightener, the higher the risk. Women who used the prod