Skin Deep: A Tool to Keep You Healthy and Safe
Did you know that the U.S. FDA doesn’t regulate the safety of cosmetic products? They don’t; so how can you know if your cosmetics products are safe? In this article we’ll look at the Skin Deep cosmetics database, a tool you can use to be sure that your beauty products are as safe as possible.
What Is Skin Deep?
Skin Deep is an online database organized and maintained by the non-profit Environmental Working Group. Started in 2004, the Skin Deep website allows consumers to freely look up cosmetic companies, individual products, or specific ingredients and check their safety rating. Safety is rated using a 0-10 scale, with products ranked 0-2 posing a low hazard, 3-6 posing a moderate hazard, and products with a score of 7-10 posing a high hazard to users’ health.
Safety is rated by comparing a product’s ingredients with 50 different databases which contain information on the health hazards posed by specific ingredients.
Currently the Skin Deep database contains information on over one quarter of all cosmetic products available on the U.S. market, that’s 53,333 products containing 8,862 different ingredients. 2,461 brands and 1,635 companies are represented on the website.