Educator's Toolkit: Taking Personal Care

Educator's Toolkit
The Green Guide, Issue 94
(January/February 2003)

Let The Green Guide inform your teaching and educate your students about their health and the risks that personal care products pose to their well-being. Exploring the health implications of personal care products is a great way to personalize and make relevant facts and concepts in chemistry, health, history, civics, and media literacy. The January/February 2003 (Newsletter #94 plus special content at The Green Guide's website) is a great resource to inform your own activities, lessons, and investigations. Most teenagers use a wide range of personal care products, and many youth are especially vulnerable to the promises of allure and acceptance that these products make. Help create better-informed consumers through your teaching -- buyers who approach cosmetics and other personal care products with accurate information and a media-literate critique of their appeal!

Why not start with the products students themselves use? Ask students to bring in some of the personal care products they use. Students can compare products and discern common, frequently-used ingredients. Green Guide 94 articles (at www.thegreenguide.com/issue.mhtml?i=94), personal care product reports (at www.thegreenguide.com/reports/), and both A Consumer's Dictionary of Cosmetic Ingredients, by Ruth Winter, M.S. (Crown, 1999) and Drop-Dead Georgeous, by Kim Erickson (Contemporary Books, 2002) are excellent sources of information on cosmetics ingredients. The FDA's website also provides information helpful to consumers (see references in The Green Guide's Product Reports on Shampoo, Nails, Deodorants and Lip & Eye Makeup for some specific FDA web pages).

Topics to explore:

What are the purposes of ingredients found in cosmetics? Students can learn about surfactants, about fixatives, about preservatives, about coloring agents, about odor-controlling strategies in anti-perspirants and deodorants, about UV protection, about humectants, etc. - along with the chemical properties of ingredients that make them useful for these functions. Many topics in organic and inorganic chemistry can be explored through the lens of personal care product ingredients.

How are cosmetics regulated? Students will be surprised to find out the FDA's role in ensuring the safety of cosmetics (see www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/cos-206.html). What do critics and cosmetics companies have to say about the current way that cosmetics are regulated? See The Green Guide 94 (www.thegreenguide.com/issue.mhtml?i=94), CHEC (www.checnet.org), and NotTooPretty (www.nottoopretty.org) for the critics' complaints; see the Cosmetics, Toiletry and Fragrance Association (www.ctfa.org) and the Cosmetic Ingredient Review website (www.cir-safety.org) for industry views.

What were personal care products and health aids like in America's past? Students can learn about the many surprising ingredients that once appeared in commonly-used remedies, personal care products, and cosmetics. The history of African American personal care products sheds a revealing light on racism and hair/skin color issues, and also includes Madame C. J. Walker, a pioneering and successful African American businesswoman. The Autobiography of Malcolm X includes a detailed description of the painful "conking" procedure used in the past to straighten hair.

You can choose to branch out and explore the "precautionary principle," a point of view that underlies the views of many critics of current cosmetics regulations. What is the precautionary principle, and should it be the guiding force in environmental and health policies? A good introduction to the precautionary principle can be found at www.psrast.org/precautintro.htm; a good critique of this principle can be found at Reason magazine, at reason.com/9904/fe.rb.precautionary.shtml.

What makes certain personal care products risky or potentially threatening to health? Your journey will range from carcinogens (and an understanding of the ways that substances can be carcinogenic), to hormone disruption risks, to threats to public health from imperiling the effectiveness of needed antibiotics, to the many ways substances can trigger allergies, to toxins, neurotoxins, and substances that can harm developing life. The World Health Organization's IARC database (www.iarc.fr) and the National Toxicology Program's Tenth Report on Carcinogens (ehp.niehs.nih.gov/roc/toc10.html) can inform your cancer research. Sandra Steingraber's Living Downstream (Vintage Books, 1998) also contains readable information on the various ways substances can create or contribute to cancer. Our Stolen Future's website (www.ourstolenfuture.org) is a great resource for hormone disruption news and information. Keep Antibiotics Working's website (www.keepantibioticsworking.com/pages/home.cfm) can inform your research on threats to the effectiveness of antibiotics. CHEC's HealtheHouse (www.checnet.org/healthehouse/chemicals/chemicals.asp) is a great resource for household threats to health. The EPA's IRIS database (Integrated Risk Information System, at www.epa.gov/iris/) and the CDC's Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaq.html) are further resources for information on substances found in cosmetics and household products that pose risks to human health.

What can students do to reduce the risks to their health from personal care products? Solutions can range from safe use strategies, choosing less toxic products, to organized consumer action. Let The Green Guide's articles in issue 94, its personal care product reports, and Drop Dead Gorgeous No More! (www.thegreenguide.com/doc.mhtml?i=int&s=phthalates), an InterActivate! call to action on phthalates, inspire and inform your students' decisions.

Why buy these products, anyway? People have been using products to enhance their beauty and hygiene for centuries, but media messages are clearly part of modern cosmetics buying for most consumers. Examining why students buy certain products, in a supportive and non-critical atmosphere, can help teens develop media literacy and lend insight into the motives and goals that prompt their personal care product choices. See the PBS Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool for a critical introduction to the way products are marketed to teens (the documentary can be purchased at www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/, which also contains educational resources for teaching with this film). POV has also produced the excellent documentary "5 Girls," which touches on peer pressure and body image as realities in the lives of teen women (website, with resources and ordering, is at www.pbs.org/pov/pov2001/5girls/). About Face (www.about-face.org) and the Girls, Women and Media Project (www.mediaandwomen.org) are other great resources for exploring the connection between advertising messages and body image, especially for young women.

Humor and parody are great teaching tools for this sensitive subject. After some initial exploration of real ads (their tone, theme, associations, promises, omitted information), students can be given the opportunity to design over-the-top ad campaigns to demonstrate or spoof certain traits found in teen ads and marketing strategies. Make sure, however, to give students a non-judgmental forum to discuss their product choices, and to design assignments that support a wide range of views on the rights and wrongs of modern marketing practices.

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"Pregnancy Do's and Don'ts," in The Green Guide 94 (www.thegreenguide.com/doc.mhtml?i=94&s=pregnancy), can enrich your exploration of pregnancy and fetal development. Why are fetuses at special risk from damaging chemicals? Why do women need to begin safeguarding their health even before they are pregnant? How do environmental toxins come to be involved in breastfeeding? Green Guide articles (past and present) and Sandra Steingraber's Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood (Perseus Publishing, 2001) are excellent resources for exploring these questions. Also utilize the website of The Center for Children's Health and the Environment, www.childenvironment.org.