Contrary to popular belief, some ingredients in beauty products aren’t that pretty.

In recent reports, there are claims that one in eight of the 82,000 common components used in personal care products are industrial chemicals, including pesticides and hormone disruptors.

Many of these ingredients contain plasticizers which keep concrete soft– imagine what that is doing to your all-organic beautiful skin and the environment.

Super market shelves are stocked piled with shampoos, deodorants, lotions, soaps and makeup that all contain potentially harmful ingredients.

According to Stacy Malkan, author of “Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry,” “Research has shown that many conventional personal-care products contain chemicals of concern that can disrupt your hormones, have been linked to cancer, cause allergies or can damage your skin.”

So the miracle cream and tonics you apply to enhance your beauty are doing the exact opposite.

These techniques of staying “fresh” and youthful are merely ploys that corporations use to convince you to spend your money through your own self-esteem complexes. Moreover, the chemicals that are present in these formulas haven’t been properly researched.

Malkan points out that there are such few safety standards for cosmetics in the United States that these “companies are basically making their own decisions about what’s safe enough to sell.”

Industry officials contend that the risks of their cosmetics are merely trace amounts of chemicals–completely nonexistent or too insignificant to affect anyone’s over all health.

The FDA does evaluate some ingredients that are in cosmetics and have issued warnings such as when formaldehyde was being used in Johnson-Johnson baby shampoo, but where are the large-scale studies that show the lasting effects of these chemicals?

The truth ism we’ll never really know for sure. It’s up to us, the daily consumers, to decide whether we’d like to apply a fruity body wash, lip balm or after shave that contains harmful ingredients.

We shouldn’t worry about just one product, or favorite brand–it’s the buildup of potentially harmful additives from a variety of different sources that we should pay attention to. Those harmful substances will eventually add up.

Many people are unaware of these toxins because cosmetics aren’t looked at as closely as food and drugs are. The adverse effects of toxins are ultimately compounded over decades, confusing hormone receptors and slowly but surely altering cell structure.

These chemicals are transmitted into the bloodstream in a number of ways–powders have the least absorption, while oily solutions or those designed to increase moisture allow more of the chemical to be absorbed.

There’s no doubt that people want to be beautiful, but remember that beauty has a price, and in this case a destructive one.

The clock is merely ticking, you’re the experiment.