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