Not Just a Pretty Face
October 22, 2007
Opium was a feel-good product — foisted on the Chinese public in the 19th century by British multinational corporations — that ultimately had a deleterious effect on public health. While multinational cosmetic companies and other multinationals are no longer beholden to just one nation, like the British East India Corporation was to Great Britain, selling skin whiteners, shampoos, lipstick and other products with potentially dangerous ingredients to youth all over the world continues an unfortunate corporate pattern of placing greed over safety and responsibility.
Meanwhile, the problem is not just corporate decision-making. Too many consumers continue to accept cosmetic industry propaganda, ignoring the science that says that many of the products we are using to beautify ourselves are poisonous to us and to our offspring as well.
According to Stacy Malkan, author of a new book, Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, “The $35 billion cosmetics industry has successfully found loopholes in the alphabet soup of government agencies (the FDA, EPA, OSHA) and its own self-monitored Cosmetic Ingredient Review, allowing for an abundance of toxic ingredients in products like nail polish, acrylics and disinfectants.”
Anyone who has walked into a nail salon can tell instantly that synthetic chemicals are involved in the process. The smells are bad enough if you just go in for a quick manicure or pedicure, but they are even more harmful for the workers who must labor there many hours a day. According to statistics provided in Malkan’s book, there were more than 57,000 nail salons in 2005, employing more than 380,000 licensed nail technicians. Ninety-five percent of those workers were women, 59 percent were women of color, and the average age was 38.
The New York Times reported recently that a 2004 survey of 100 New York salon employees found that 37 percent said they suffered from eye irritation, 57 percent from allergies, 66 percent from neck or back discomfort, and 18 percent from asthma. Yet many Asian immigrants continue to operate these salons, which can be opened for under $100,000 with little English and little training.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has published safety brochures and distributed $200,000 in grants to address toxic chemical exposure for salon workers and customers, and the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has done a few investigations of particularly horrible situations, as when a manicurist caught fire recently in Hillsdale, New Jersey.
This governmental response has not been enough, however, so advocacy groups have stepped in. In New York, for example, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund has sued salons that violate overtime laws, and the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association has joined with city and state lawmakers to create an alliance that is pushing for stricter air quality regulations at salons.
ColorLines, Nha Magazine and other immigrant-focused publications have highlighted the environmental toxins issue recently, and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network has done direct actions, organizing and alliance-building, to help low-income APAs address these issues.
Other resources include a good issue brief on the environmental impact of nail salon toxins, produced by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, as well as the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, organized by Asian Health Services and advocates from environmental groups, APA organizations and the health care profession.
Not Just a Pretty Face author Stacy Malkan is communications director of Health Care Without Harm and a media strategist for the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a national coalition working to eliminate hazardous chemicals from personal care products.
Her book offers an insider’s view of the five-year campaign by environmental and health groups to pressure the U.S. cosmetics industry to use safer ingredients.
The best aspect of Malkan’s book is that it does not end by leaving us in a pool of anxiety, scared to touch even a bar of soap.
Readers are uplifted by stories of mothers who organized and fought back on behalf of their children, activists from Women’s Voices for the Earth who dressed up as “Miss Treatment” to publicize their concerns, and San Francisco teenagers who wore prom dresses and combat boots at their “Project Prom” rally in Union Square to declare their war on toxic chemicals.
To order a copy for your cosmetics-obsessed younger relative, or to find out what you can do about the toxic cosmetics in your own life, go to www.notjustaprettyface.org.
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I read Mr. Nash’s article with a more hopeful sense that the Asian community that is laboring in the beauty industry will finally wake up to the dangers that lurk behind each manicure that they perform, or each pedicure that they diligently do to turn a customer’s abused and worn feet into a work of art. Since getting back from a free clinic that we sponsor on behalf of a beauty supply business and our own disinfectant line of products called Ameri-Kleen, I am dismayed at the lack of knowledge that licensed nail technicians have on the topic of sanitation. So one of our biggest message was this at the clinic: If not for the protection of your client, think about protecting your own health, your family’s health, because what you do at work can and could dramatically affect the health of those closest to you. Imagine the case in Texas where a nail technician, due to many factors and perhaps situations not due to her own choices, contracts a lethal strain of staph (current CDC study on staph and its prevalence in our community should be another wake up call) through the equipment she uses in her line of work (namely, a spa chair that HAS NOT been properly cleaned or disinfected after each client) and now imagine her coming home after a long days work and prepares for her family their dinner. Not knowing that she has contracted a vicious form of staph, she craddles her youngest child in her arms, kisses her eldest for helping her clean up after dinner, etc.
Hopefully, you get the point. Without the knowledge necessary to navigate herself away from harm, she is in a situation where perhaps the owner of that salon, due to economics and other factors, commands her to forgo the disinfecting stage because it costs the salon money, and tells her that using soap more than adequate. Situations like these bear to mind the need for continued outreach and for consumers to understand the plight of many hard working individuals in this beauty driven society. Just think about it, a $1.60 worth of disinfectant could have prevented her from contracting staph that might result in her family paying the price for the job she desperately needs to help the family achieve the American dream. I hope that we as consumers understand the products that we use can be harmful to our health and I also hope that we can try to understand the plight of those whose lives are intricatly interweaved with our sometimes selfish needs to get away and relax, to pamper ourselves, yet they too, go home at night but with perhaps a life-altering ailment that in many circumstances, could and should have been stopped from occuring. I commend those who are in a position that can bring forth changes that can help those with perhaps the most to lose, and also stop the tide of greed that seems to bear its weight on the weakest and most vulnerable segments of society.
[…] Ugly Face of Beauty I read Mr. Nash’s article (“Not Just a Pretty Face,” Washington Journal, Oct. 19) with a more hopeful sense that the Asian community laboring in the […]