How Lipstick Can Harm Women’s Health?

Women use lipstick on their lips and the use of harmful ingredients can be quite risky. Some cheaper lipstick could have noxious blend of petroleum-based chemicals. Unfortunately, some of them are not yet tested for safety. Some of them may result in allergic reactions and could interfere with our body’s hormone. They could also harm our immune and nervous systems. It is something that many women should think about when they are using specific colors to make themselves look attractive. The truth is, coal tar is often used to make coloring ingredients, including for lipstick. Although it is not yet validated that coal tar can cause cancer, we could be certain that petroleum-based products won’t be good for our body.

Arsenic and lead are also dangerous and small doses of them can be ingested when women lick their lips. Tests on many brands of lipsticks have found that many of them contain lead at higher concentration that’s allowed on food. We may consider that higher level of lead in lipstick is acceptable because women don’t eat their lipstick. However, lead is a heavy metal and it won’t be excreted by our system. It is obviously dangerous to add an extra amount of lead, each time we lick our lips. Heavy metals are also skin irritants on some people, so they should consider themselves lucky, because it is easier for them to detect potentially dangerous lipstick brands. This is especially true because heavy metals can cause problems on our reproductive and nervous systems.

In reality, many chemicals that we put on our skin can be absorbed and transported by our bloodstream. This could cause a big concern if we are using lipstick with toxic amount of arsenic and lead. Unfortunately, many lipstick products don’t accurately list their ingredients in the packaging. It’s best to pass up any kind of lipstick that has specific coloring ingredients with numbers behind their names. Other than colors, our lipstick could also contain other harmful chemicals, such as endocrine disruptors and xenoestrogens, that can interfere with the normal production and functioning of our hormones. Derivatives of parabens, such propylparabens and methylparabens could also be found in our lipstick.

Penetration enhancer is another ingredient that we should pass up. It could allow lipstick to penetrate deeper to the lips surface, to make sure that the color will stick longer. However, it could also mean that dangerous chemicals can go deeper in our body. The penetration enhancer itself can actually be risky and the common type of penetration enhance is propylene glycol. It is important to choose organic lipstick that may not be free of chemicals, but we could be sure that they contain much less. It can be rather tricky to find products that are completely free of dangerous ingredients. In fact, we need to use a magnifying glass, because lipstick packaging is usually too small to list all the ingredients. These are simple precautions we could do to make ourselves healthier.