Not Just a pretty face: the ugly side of the beauty industry by stacy malkan book review

Review by Lisa Powell, Green Health Research Contributor

A new book by an environmentalist decrying the chemicals in our everyday products is nothing new. Stacy Malkan’s approach, however, is. Malkan works for an environmental watch-dog group, but her refreshing take on the subject of personal care and cosmetic safety makes her book more readable and enjoyable than many others written by similar writers.

Malkan’s book focuses on her personal work with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a coalition of non-profit groups that urge cosmetic companies to remove potentially hazardous ingredients from their products. Malkan and others founded the Campaign after their independent tests of products manufactured by cosmetics companies revealed that many products included lead, propylene glycol (one of the main ingredients in anti-freeze), and other chemicals known to cause adverse health effects.

Malkan also goes “undercover” at the cosmetic industry’s trade association meeting to learn more about how the cosmetic industry justifies their use of these harmful chemicals and if the industry is concerned about the public’s increasing knowledge of the health risks associated with many of their products. She balances this reporting with coverage of an organic cosmetic product exposition held in California and records the differences not just in the products themselves, but in the attitudes held by organic cosmetics companies and those of the larger multinational cosmetic corporations.

Malkan also chronicles the Campaign’s ongoing struggle to get straight answers to their health questions from large beauty companies, and how this smoke and mirror game is common among large cosmetic corporations. Malkan shows excerpts from letters written by different beauty companies which reveal the extent to which these companies are willing to either conceal information or deliberately distort facts when asked direct questions by both consumer advocacy groups and individual consumers. The content of many of these letters would surprise even the most disillusioned or cynical reader.

Besides this personal investigative journalism, Malkan backs up her claims about cosmetic safety with numerous medical studies which show how the chemicals we use everyday can affect our health and well-being. Malkan’s scientific research was all conducted by independent third-parties, so the reader can trust that the information she provides is both accurate and unbiased. While it’s clear that Malkan is on a mission, she never lets her goal overcome her desire to provide fair and precise information to the reader.

Malkan doesn’t simply deal in hard facts, however, sprinkling her story with short excerpts about women who attribute their personal health and wellness battles to the chemicals used in cosmetics. For example, one mother believes her son’s genital birth defect may have been caused by a class of chemicals called phthalates commonly used in cosmetics. This woman, a former model, believes that her constant, high-level of exposure to these chemicals resulted in her son’s deformity because similar genital deformities are seen in lab animals whose mothers were given equivalently high levels of phthalates throughout their pregnancies.

These short personal stories, however anecdotal they may be, enforce the idea in the reader’s mind that if toxic chemicals could impact the lives of others they could just as easily affect the reader or the reader’s family. It’s this connection with her audience which gives Malkan an edge over her fellow activist writers. She can convey the gravity of her subject matter without becoming a bleeding-heart or cramming her opinion down the reader’s throat.