As a beauty industry expert, Jayn Sterland, managing director of Weleda UK , talks us through how the environmental issues matter to the beauty industry & how we need to change…

How are we treating our skin?

Being the largest organ in our body, our skin has an important job. It protects us from the outside world, acting as a barrier to numerous pathogenic threats and helping to eliminate toxins. Our skin regulates our temperature, insulating us against extremes while balancing the amount of moisture we lose daily. It plays host to 1000+ different microbes (bacteria to you and me). And it even makes life-enhancing substances like Vitamin D. Yet every day we subject it to a host of unregulated chemicals through the products we use to cleanse and ‘treat’ our skin. We all have seemingly innocent products in our bathrooms, but there are often chemicals that strip away skin’s natural protection. This leads to a change in pH & creates the potential for damage and irritation.

Where did we go wrong?

Since the 1950s, we have moved from the weekly bath in front of the fire to showering daily. This has fuelled today’s multi-billion pound cosmetics industry…

What we’re currently doing:

• Using detergents on a daily basis which strip away the natural oils in our hair and body, meaning we require moisturisers and conditioners to replace the oils we have just washed off.
• We’ve discovered the joy of bubbles, many of which are known skin irritants.
• We want to smell ‘nice’ so we have created perfumes to scent our bodies containing a host of ‘secret’ chemicals.
• There are now many special hair cleansing products on the market. The first shampoo was only invented in the 1930s – what did we do before this? This has led to conditioners, gels, mousses, waxes and sprays we ingest as we use them.

Our ‘beauty needs’ support a £6bn industry and we are spending more money on products but becoming sicker.

What can we do about it?

There’s a simple reason we don’t want these unnatural ingredients on skin – “what goes on you goes in you”. While many of these chemicals are safe to use in small amounts, if taken as a cocktail they can potentially pass directly into our bodies.  Especially when used on broken, stressed or sun damaged skin they can wreak havoc with our finely tuned system. This can then lead to anything from a mild imbalance through to something much more debilitating. It is still legal for products to contain chemicals that are known allergens, many of which we find in industrial end products such as anti-freeze, petrol, oven cleaners, stain removers and paint.

While the EU has the most rigorous cosmetic standards in the world, many of the chemicals have not been tested for long-term human use over generations. For example, the surfactant sodium laureth sulphate is a known irritant, that can cause itching & burning but is also linked to a carcinogen. Laureth sulphate will be found in many of your bathroom favourites like shampoo, shower gel and facewash, as it creates a foamy lather. A natural alternative, derived from vegetables oils & plant sugars is cocoglucoside. It’s milder but gives a lovely sudsy lather. As an industry we need to clean up our act and put consumer health before shareholder profit.

What we need to do:

• Be honest about our credentials and stop ‘greenwashing’
• Take responsibility for our industry
• Act now

Cleaning up our products and our shelves before the beauty industry becomes the tobacco industry of tomorrow.