Global Health Asia-Pacific September 2020 September 2020 | Page 68

Column Toxic ingredients in your hair care products making you “tox sick”? Toxic chemical haircare is hurting our health and environment Today’s haircare and beauty products might entice us with attractive packaging and fancy commercials, but behind the glamour is a soup of toxic chemical ingredients that are best avoided. This is easy to do these days with the wide variety of natural products on the market that contain so many wonderful raw oils, herbs, botanicals, and essential oils. Many kinds of butter are also beneficial to our skin and hair, so we don’t need to expose ourselves to these harmful and toxic ingredients anymore. If you want to avoid carcinogens, pesticides, reproductive toxins, and hormone disruptors which can affect us every day, then natural is the ��� if you don’t want to get TO�-SIC�. As you can imagine, industrial chemicals both harm the environment and alter our health, leading to autoimmune diseases caused by in�ammation in the body. The shocking facts about commercial toxic chemical haircare products Toxic chemical haircare products are on the rise, but most people don’t know that the toxic chemicals found in them are shockingly harmful to our health. Some scientists conducted experiments that found over �,000 different toxic chemicals in hair dye products, some of which were reported to be carcinogenic (cancer-causing) to animals. As you dye your hair, you breathe in toxic fumes and chemicals, which are absorbed into your body via your scalp. Other recent studies have found a link between hair dyes and an increased risk of bladder cancer in hairdressers, potentially because of the chemicals found in hair dye. The use of commercial hair dyes has also been linked to an increased risk of leukaemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Other research is ongoing. Although manufacturers have improved the 66 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2020 GlobalHealthAsiaPacific.com