Beauty tips for the FDA: did my wife's cosmetics give her breast cancer?

• Author: Wasik, John F.
• Position: Food and Drug Authority

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When Kathleen felt a lump in her right breast she began a journey that millions have experienced--or, sadly, will experience. After a painful biopsy and other tests confirmed it was cancer, my wife was thrown into a cauldron of tears, doubt, and fear for herself and her loved ones. Our two daughters were then just eight and twelve.

Like many cancer patients, Kathleen also experienced a stranglehold of guilt. Was it something she did or didn't do that fed the tumor? Was it the meat in our diet? Our water? The air? Her genes? I assured her that we couldn't be at fault. We had banned soda pop and anything with high-fructose corn syrup from our house more than a decade before. We tried to eat organic food, we were transitioning to more vegetarian fare, and she did yoga and took regular walks. We didn't even have cable.

After a test showed that Kathleen didn't have the BRCA breast cancer gene, her surgeon, Dr. Sonya Sharpless, suggested that environmental factors might be implicated. But what could they be? Kathleen had already thrown out a bevy of household cleaning products and plastic containers.

Then she discovered the work of the Breast Cancer Fund, a San Francisco--based advocacy group that for the last ten years has been focusing on cancer-causing agents in personal care products. Through a coalition of health and environmental groups called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (of which the Breast Cancer Fund is the principal sponsor), the organization has been drawing attention to the fact that known carcinogens-substances like formaldehyde--are used as preservatives in everything from suntan oil to makeup. Kathleen Afrantically threw out her all her expensive Clinique and Shiseido cosmetics.

Did a lifetime of using cosmetics cause or contribute to Kathleen's breast cancer? We don't know. But here are some facts that every American woman and her loved ones should absorb. The European Union bans nearly 1,400 chemicals from personal care products because they are carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction. But in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration entrusts safety regulation of cosmetics to a private entity that is housed and funded by the industry's trade association. To date, this entity has found only eleven chemicals to be "unsafe for use in cosmetics." The FDA has no oversight of cosmetics products before they come on the market and, unlike the EU, leaves it to the cosmetics industry to determine which ingredients should be banned.

Because the American cosmetics industry is largely self-regulated, American women have to worry that they may be exposed to all sorts of cosmetics ingredients that may be dangerous to their health. Without greater powers for the FDA to regulate cosmetics, there is just no way that people like Kathleen who have cancer, or those who fear getting it, can know for sure. Indeed, even while in the hospital cancer patients are exposed to cosmetic products that the FDA has never evaluated and that activist groups like the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics say contain known or suspected carcinogens.

This happened to Kathleen. During her first round of chemo in 2009, some volunteers at the hospital came calling with a little red bag that contained products from Clinique, Estee Lauder, and Del Laboratories. Everything from eyeliner pencils to blush was in the bag, accompanied by a brochure that provided helpful advice on skin care and wig purchases.

Her well-meaning visitors were part of the Look Good Feel Better program (LGFB), which involves 16,000 volunteers who hand out $10 million worth of personal care products every year to women being treated for cancer. Behind this effort is a Who's Who of the personal care industry: Alberto Culver, Avon, Chanel, Coty, Aveda, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena, L'Oreal, LVMH, Mary Kay, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, among others. The sponsors, as Kathleen learned from the brochure, are the American Cancer Society and the Personal Care Products Council (PCPC), the leading national trade association representing the global cosmetic and personal care products industry, which, through its tax-exempt foundation, kicked in $8.6 million to LGFB in 2011.

No doubt many women who are feeling awful about the loss of their hair, breasts, and dignity are grateful for these gifts from the cosmetics industry. But Kathleen, even though the chemotherapy by this point had...