A Community-based Investigation of Ingredients in Beauty and Personal Care Products Sold in Northern Manhattan
We use a variety of personal care products every day, everything from cosmetics to soaps and shampoos to hair straighteners. But do we know what’s really in these products, and what impacts they may have on our health? You’d need a science degree to identify most of the ingredients, and a medical degree to understand their potential impacts on our health.
The truth is that personal care products are largely unregulated. The Food & Drug Administration only bans 11 ingredients whereas the European Union bans 1,300 due to concerns about the threat they pose to human health.
To get a better understanding of what ingredients are in the products being sold on store shelves in Northern Manhattan, we teamed up with Clearya to use its Clearya Survey app for a citizen science project – Inside the Beauty Aisle – collecting data on the toxic ingredients found in personal care products sold in stores throughout our community. Our members scanned 733 unique beauty and personal care products sold in local beauty supply stores of predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods in Northern Manhattan.
Product label photos and ingredient lists were then analyzed using the Clearya Insights platform to identify chemicals of concern. Chemicals of concern in this analysis include ingredients linked to health concerns such as cancer, hormone disruption, reproductive harm, PFAS (“forever chemicals”), and ingredients restricted or banned in other jurisdictions, among others. We found that 60 percent of products contained at least one prioritized chemical of concern – meaning ingredients in this analysis are linked to cancer, hormone disruption, reproductive harm, or are restricted in some regions.
Stay tuned for the full analysis and methodology, which we will be sharing shortly.
