Campaign For Safe Cosmetics Unimpressed By CTFA Consumer Commitments
By Ryan Nelson

The Rose Sheet visit Web site »
3/19/07
 
Initiatives from the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association toward greater transparency and tighter self-regulation under its renewed commitment to consumers have not slowed the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

Ultimately, the campaign would like to see stronger government regulation of cosmetics, Malkan indicated, adding that the coalition will be pushing legislation on both the state and federal levels.

CTFA’s efforts – its new Consumer Commitment Code, in particular – “fall short of what’s needed for true cosmetics safety,” according to campaign rep Stacy Malkan, Health Care Without Harm. She referred to the measure as the “Consumer Non-Commitment Code because it’s really not much more than what [industry is] already doing.”

To be in compliance with the code, which CTFA says “formalizes” and reinforces many safety practices already widely observed among industry members, participating companies must be able to produce – at FDA’s request – safety data for each formulation they market in the U.S. (“The Rose Sheet” March 12, 2007, p. 3).

However, the circumstances under which such data would actually be invoked remain unclear, Malkan says.

“What we see with the Consumer Commitment Code is [that] they’re saying, ‘If FDA comes asking, we’ll give them some information about safety. ... [But] what does it mean ‘if FDA comes asking’? What I’ve heard [CTFA] say in the past is it means a formal letter with reason [or] cause for concern.”

Also, “what information then is sufficient?” Malkan questioned. The campaign’s impression, based on its exchanges with CTFA, is that the answer is: “Anything you have in the drawer.”

“It could be a statement from a manufacturer, it could be [that] the Cosmetic Ingredient Review panel looked at it, it could be a paragraph that says, ‘It’s safe; trust us,’” Malkan said.

Reference to CTFA’s Web site would suggest that a more comprehensive safety file is expected, including a list of raw ingredients and their concentrations, a description of the manufacturing process and a computation of the incidence of adverse health effects associated with the product in question (“The Rose Sheet” Feb. 5, 2007, p. 3).

Nevertheless, it is a voluntary program, Malkan pointed out. Though CTFA has made its membership’s 100-percent compliance a top priority in 2007, “the bottom line is that companies don’t have to do it,” she said.

Currently, “the cosmetics companies say, ‘We test our chemicals and we know [they’re safe].’ And we would certainly challenge them to share that information because it would be tremendously helpful if [they] would share with the rest of the industry and with the public the information that they’ve gathered about toxicity.”

In the absence of such disclosures, however, “the situation is that we have to trust them, and the new Consumer Commitment Code is basically a marketing plan to say, ‘You can trust us’ – but we don’t buy it,” Malkan said.

Since 2004, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has been circulating a compact of its own. To date, 540 companies have signed on to eliminate toxic ingredients from their products.

The campaign characterizes “toxic ingredients” as those linked to hormone disruption, birth defects, cancer and other health risks, but acknowledges that “no easy list” of such chemicals is available.

In fact, Malkan said, the Environmental Working Group’s “Skin Deep” online database – which compares personal care products against a list of problematic chemicals compiled by such government agencies as NIH’s National Toxicology Program, the International Agency for Research on Cancer and California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazards Assessment – indicates that “there are huge gaps in information about the health impacts of chemicals.”

It remains to be seen whether the consumer-oriented Web site CTFA aims to launch this summer – touted as a resource that “will give consumers unprecended, easy access to current, factual, scientifically based information on consumer product and ingredient safety” – will help fill any of those gaps.

Until further information emerges, “we’re working in a landscape of many, many questions about the health impacts of chemicals,” Malkan said.

Details Of The Compact

To promote safety within this landscape, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics mandates first that compact-signing companies be in compliance with formulation standards outlined in the European Cosmetics Directive and avoid using any of the 1,200 chemicals banned in the EU, Janet Nudelman, campaign coordinator and program director at the Breast Cancer Fund, explained in a March 14 interview.

Second, participants are expected to analyze their products for chemicals of concern using the Skin Deep database.

“Compact-signing companies are given a backdoor entrance into that database where they can enter in all of their ingredient decks, basically in a comma delimited file – just separated by commas – and Skin Deep will generate a personalized safety report for them,” Nudelman said.

“It will tell them with either the public health concerns that are flagged or the environmental concerns, [indicating] whether the chemical is associated with cancer, reproductive harm, neurotoxicity, endocrine disruption, if it bioaccumulates in the environment [or] persists in the environment,” she noted.

Next, firms are asked to devise a plan and timeline for replacing chemicals of concern with safe alternatives. Ingredients for which safety information is limited or unavailable are expected to be investigated by the company via a prescribed hazard assessment.

The campaign acknowledges that its goals are ambitious and necessitate a “big commitment.”

“We’re really quite aware of the fact that for a big company the size of The Body Shop,” for example, “it’s quite a bit more challenging for them to reformulate hundreds of products as opposed to a smaller company that may have a dozen products,” Nudelman observed. “So we’re really quite reasonable in working with these companies,” she said.

Under the fourth component of the compact, product labeling is to include a full list of ingredients in INCI (International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients) format, as required under European law, as well as by their common names, some of which are more readily recognized by consumers, Nudelman said.

The campaign currently is working with companies to make the labeling stipulation practicable, according to Nudelman. One option being entertained is that the more involved of the two listings be featured on the firm’s Web site. There, the company should also post its “chemicals policy” describing “what it will and what it won’t do vis-à-vis its use of chemicals in cosmetics,” Nudelman said.

Finally, companies must provide an annual report updating the campaign on the status of their compliance.

Campaigning For Legislation

Ultimately, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics would like to see more stringent government regulation of cosmetics, Malkan indicated. Going forward, the coalition will be pushing legislation on both the state and federal levels, she said.

It is doubtful that the coalition will lobby Congress for a regulatory system such as that in place for the regulation of drugs, as its foremost concerns often have less to do with the amount of a particular chemical in a particular product than the significance of repeated exposure to the chemical through habitual application and/or the use of multiple products containing the ingredient.

More likely, it will pursue regulations reminiscent of those cropping up in Europe where suspect ingredients are not only restricted but in many cases outright banned.

Malkan was complimentary of such movements in the EU and particularly of the recently instituted Registration, Evaluation, Authorization & Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) laws.

“Europe is really leading the way with not only the cosmetics regulations but also chemicals regulations,” Malkan remarked, adding that “REACH is going to result in a lot more information about the toxicity of chemicals coming into the market over the next few years.”

“I think the smart cosmetics companies will be looking down the road into taking a precautionary approach to chemicals, which means saying, ‘There’s evidence that this is problematic, [so] let’s look for safer alternatives on the sooner side rather than arguing for years about the science,’” Malkan concluded.