Don't Cover Up with CoverGirl

Don't let the excessive Photoshopping or sweet smiles fool you; CoverGirl is hardly a brand that warrants enthusiasm.  For a little clarification as to why, here’s the promised review of CoverGirl cosmetics, courtesy of Skin Deep Cosmetic Database:

CoverGirl

Unlike the previously reviewed Maybelline, CoverGirl only boasts ONE safely-rated product, its Cover FX Powder and Mineral Foundation.  The brand’s other products – all 918 of them – fall within a hazardous 3-9 range.  Interestingly enough, the majority of its cosmetics include a variety of foundations, all of which are liquid, and all of which are considered unsafe given their ingredients (with the exception of the Cover FX Powder and Mineral Foundation, which is a pressed powder foundation).

When transitioning to more natural and safe cosmetics and skin care, you’ll find it’s rather difficult finding a liquid foundation that is formulated with safe ingredients, even more so a liquid foundation that is both safe AND effective.  In having sampled several, I’ve found that many offer little coverage, if any, and are often rather greasy, having substituted conventional chemical additives for botanical oils.  In the former’s case, these conventional ingredients provide the easily applicable liquid consistency.  In the latter’s, plant oils and extracts must be utilized in such a way as to achieve a liquid consistency similar to that of their conventional counterparts.  Unfortunately, however, formulating natural liquid foundations with oil as a base offers little in the way of easy application or adequate coverage.  Even so, that’s not to say that both safe and effective liquid foundations don’t exist.  It simply necessitates trial-and-error, which natural/organic cosmetics companies are more than willing to cater to.  Unlike more well-known brands that require you commit to the purchase of a full-sized product if you want to try it out, companies like Alima Pure offer samples of ALL their products for very reasonable prices, along with the assurance that what you’re sampling is completely safe to use.   

Are you sure you want to use that?

Popular cosmetic giants like Maybelline and CoverGirl are among many prevalent brands women turn to for their particular beautification needs.  For many, cosmetics are simply a means to an end – looking good and feeling good about it.  Women are far more concerned with the effectiveness of their make-up rather than what’s actually used to produce it.  Professed to complement our natural features and preserve our appearance, ironically, most well-known cosmetic companies opt for ingredients that do little in the ways of accomplishing this.  For all you ladies out there, here’s a heads up on one of the major cosmetics brands out there - Maybelline. 

Maybelline

Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Cosmetic Database has thus far evaluated a whopping 441 products of Maybelline, of which its safety ratings range from a reassuring score of one to a highly disconcerting eight.  What does this mean as it applies to the brand as a whole?  The good news is that there are in fact products that have been deemed safe, as is the case with their Fit Me! Pressed Powders, Define-A-Line Eyeliner, and Pure Concealers.   Everything else, on the other hand, not so much.  Of the 441 products reviewed, only 19 of them fall within the safe range of 0-2.  In other words, you run the risk of exposing your body to a number of ingredients that have the data and statistics to back up their toxicity. 

For instance, consider Maybelline’s Dream Mousse Foundation, furnished an intermediate rating of five.  Its chock full of parabens (five to be exact), synthetic preservatives that have no purpose outside of ensuring your makeup can sit of a shelf for months, even years at a time without compromising the integrity of the formula.  These additives have been shown to mimic hormones our bodies naturally produce and thereby disrupt key organ functions.  In fact, they’ve even come under fire for causing breast cancer in women – parabens often mimic the female hormone estrogen, of which heightened levels can result in breast cancer.  And that’s just one of the multiple ingredients included suspected of detrimental health effects.     

Coming Soon: CoverGirl’s safety evaluation . . .

The Cosmetic Conundrum

A dab of blush here, a touch of mascara there.  For most women, dabbling in cosmetics is commonplace.  And why shouldn’t it be, what with luxurious-looking skincare and make-up brands plastering the pages of nearly every magazine?  Cosmetic enhancement offers the hope that all women alike can look and feel beautiful, sheathed behind an armor of head-turning lipstick and that perfect smoky eye.  Yet for all cosmetic brands offer in the ways of bolstering physical appearance, they harbor a fatal flaw: the lack any kind of substantial regulation. 

Many forget that our skin is our body’s largest organ; it serves as a protective barrier to the outside world and a gateway in which foreign substances are processed.  You’d think given that fact that the Food and Drug Administration would take steps to ensure that cosmetics and skin care are properly manufactured with safe, wholesome ingredients.  Wrong.  According to the FDA, cosmetic products and ingredients are not subject to any kind of premarket approval, with the exception of color additives, which have been shown to exhibit some nasty side-effects.  Aside from that, cosmetic companies are given free reign as to what they’re allowed to produce, and in many cases, that includes a number of potentially harmful ingredients. 

Learning to Translate

For those who have yet to devote a lot of time towards researching what’s commonly included in processed foods, here’s a quick list of food additives you should try to avoid, taken directly from http://www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm.  It’s a wonderful source in deciphering ingredients whose names are of particular peculiarity.