There’s been a chain of events in my life that has brought me to the point where you find me now, formulating my own beauty products. The story begins in my early 20s when one of my best friends died from malignant melanoma metastasis. That’s the fancy medical way of saying she had skin cancer and it was all over the place inside her. It has always been my firm belief that she got skin cancer from her constant and lengthy exposure to tanning beds. None of the doctors suspected it until it was far too late because of her youth. That was the first time I really became aware that your personal care products and treatments could be detrimental to your well-being.
Later on, I had a co-worker who began losing her hair. Her family was well off so they took her from specialist to specialist until they found one whose advice worked. This doctor completely changed her hair care routine and banned almost every product she’d been using, claiming that the ingredients in them were either partially or completely to blame for her thinning and receding hair. Not a good look in Texas, the home of big hair. Doubtful, she tried the new routine and her hair started growing back in again. This was something of a shocking revelation for me. All the things that we’re told will give us healthy shiny perfectly styled hair might combine in ways that could cause you to go bald. I changed jobs and lost track of her but that stayed in the back of my mind.
My next unpleasant discovery came when my Dad came to visit. He saw my dusting powder sitting on the bathroom vanity and urged me to throw it out. It’s Texas. Summers here are hot and sweaty. If you don’t want to be a sticky sweaty mess, you wear powder in the summer. When I asked him why he explained that it had been known for decades that talc contains asbestos and no one should be using talc. Talc, being a mineral, seems to form with or near asbestos so almost all talc, at least according to my father, is contaminated to some degree or other. He suggested using corn starch instead. My dad found this out while in the military because the military issued talc-based foot powder and some issues had been traced back to it.
The next link in this chain happened when mainstream media outlets started voicing concerns over EDTA. Limited exposure to EDTA isn’t bad as long as you get enough potassium in your diet. EDTA will permeate the skin, enter the bloodstream, and bind to the potassium in your blood which causes your kidneys to flush that out. That was when I realized that the things I put on me were ending up in my blood, my tissues, my organs. That made me go look at literally everything I was using. I literally sat in the middle of my bedroom floor looking at the MSDS sheets on every single ingredient. Most of what I had been using went straight into the trash. The real eye-openers were the ingredients in my eye shadow and nail polish. Some of those things had pigments in them that had been banned by the automotive industry because they were harmful to the employees. Yet, here I am, applying this stuff to my eyelids and my fingernails on a fairly routine basis.
I started trying to buy more expensive brands, thinking that it was just the cheap dollar store and drug store brands that were a bit iffy. I switched my shampoo to a designer brand but that brand was discontinued so I changed again. Then stories began to appear about beauty products being contaminated with everything from dioxin to benzene to siloxane. I changed to “organic” products only to find out that the manufacturer wasn’t actually putting all the ingredients on the label. Later on, I wasn’t too surprised to find out that this brand was associated with a bunch of issues. Now I’m seeing lawsuits by thousands of women that are being settled because of the claims around hair loss, scalp damage, and chemical burns.
That’s when I decided that I’d start trying to formulate things just for me. No, it’s not that I’m some Disney princess who can walk out into the backyard, whistle, and the birds will bring me everything I need. I do still source a lot of my ingredients. I tend to stick to food-grade ingredients so that I can be more certain of the purity and lack of toxic hitchhiker ingredients. For that reason, I have a strong preference for USP-certified products. I’ll write more about that later. The other thing about making my own products is that I put as much or a little of an active ingredient into the formulation as I care to use. I can adjust any or all of the ingredients from batch to batch to make it optimal for me. If I’m sunburned, I might adjust my moisturizer to help my skin heal and repair sun damage. If it’s been particularly dry and my hair is dry, I may add more humectant to my conditioner when I make the next batch.
