CSN - Forum

mercurynews.com
10/08/2013
By Heather Somerville

Women's consumer advocates take on cosmetics industry

It began more than a decade ago with four women who wondered whether the hair spray, perfume and shampoo they were using every day were safe.

Their quest to find an answer led them to their neighborhood drugstores, where they spent hours reading the labels on beauty products. What they read disturbed them: lists of chemicals and ingredients whose names they couldn't pronounce.

This bootstrap effort grew into a national movement -- the San Francisco-based Campaign for Safe Cosmetics -- that has transformed the way consumers shop for personal care items, pushed the cosmetics industry to change the way it makes products, pressured lawmakers to call for more oversight and moved Walmart, the world's largest retailer, to announce a policy last month banning some harmful chemicals from beauty merchandise.

"They really moved the needle on this," Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at UC San Francisco, said ...