Lipstick Warning!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071011/...pstick_lead_dc

This was on mini-news. I don't use makeup very often but just threw out my CoverGirl stuff - will pick up non-leaded lipstick/powder next time I go to the store.

WOW .... frightening/// I am glad I use health food store brand ... but I should check to make sure no lead

I don't use cover girl. One it always makes me break out and two they do their testing on animals.

It was 3 companies at least. Sharky, I'm not sure if they would actually label it with "lead" if it was in there - you'd have to test it or something.

Pearl finish nail polish, eye shadow and other makeup used to contain ground up glass to give the sparkly look.

I'm surprised that cosmetics today still contain lead though. I use Revlon mostly and I didn't see their name mentioned in that article, so I'm not going to worry.

Originally Posted by GoldenKitty45

It was 3 companies at least. Sharky, I'm not sure if they would actually label it with "lead" if it was in there - you'd have to test it or something.

Click to expand...

mine is mineral based so I just have to read the ingredaints :_)

Scary. Thanks for the info.

wow...that's nice. I have L'Oreal (eyeshadow tho).

I really wish that companies didn't try to save a buck (or put an extra in their product) by using Chinese imported materials. The U.S. really needs to start regulating this stuff.

Oh I agree - and all of a sudden we have TONS of toys from China that contain lead? How many toys did we all play with as a child that could have contained lead?

And Revlon is one that doesn't contain lead - so I'll pick up that.

I'll just stick to my Burt's Bees from now on

I find a lot of this info just causes panic for no reason. Much ado about nothing IMO. If people were aware of what they are ingesting outside their home, they would start living in a bubble.

Probably right about that

Yah - not really any reason to freak out in my opinion. This discussion came up on another forum I'm on and one member who is a scientist posted that the panic was really sort of ridiculous for several reasons. One was that the amount of lead that would be used (and she knew the reason they use it too - I think it had something to do with binding of the ingredients together) was so tiny that there was no reason to panic. First of all, we can ingest a certain amount without having to worry because it just gets passed through your system - it's when you ingest too much to pass through in the normal time frame you have to worry. And the amount from licking your lips would be nothing to worry about. She suggested you would have to eat several tubes of lipstick at once before it was a danger at all. Secondly, what's unsafe for children and what's unsafe for adults are far different. Our systems can process a lot more before it builds up. And not too many 3-year-olds are using lipstick! Anyway, I'm not at all worried. People have been using lipstick every day for years with no harm. Look at all the 90-year-old women out there using it!

The amount of lead in lipsticks aside, I worked in a cosmetics factory one summer in college that assembled the final product for a number of well-known brands like Estee Lauder and Lancome. I worked on a few lines but I got on a lipstick line fairly quickly. The head of the line, the inserter, would take the lipstick heads out of the refridge (we all wore gloves). She would insert the lipstick into the base. It would come to me and I would put it into this guilltone-like machine to cut the tip. Lipstick would then go into a Bunson-burner tunnel. Then the capper would twist it close and put it in the caps.
Purpose of this is that you have lipsticks coming from refrigeration and going through Bunson burners before they get to you. Having seen and done tasks on the other lines, got to tell you lipsticks are very sanitized.

I agree, some of these things are just pure ridiculous. Just about everything in life is dangerous in a small way. Eating anything from a grocery store seems to be a bad thing too. Can't live in bubble - we just have to choose what is acceptle risk for each of us. This small amount in the lipstick, is nothing - you'd have to snack on whole lipsticks for it to become even the slightest concern.

Which brings to point that it should be kept away from unsupervised kids - but that can be said for anything - kids should be supervised

The range it gives is fairly big, from 0.03 (below the level safe for food of which you ingest a lot more of than lipstick, how long does a lipstick last you compared to a candy of the same size? ) to 0.65 which is fairly high and I wouldn't go throwing my makeup out for having 0.03 ppm - so I will just wait and see for more independent testing, statistics can be shown to say anything

But I love my Cover Girl lipstick...

Then don't stop using it You are AOK. Just don't eat it.