Cosmetics Safety Database

Jane Houlihan is vice president for research at the Environmental Working Group and the creator of Skin Deep, an online cosmetics safety database. The database provides safety ratings for more than 62,000 products. See: www.cosmeticsdatabase.com

Watch video with Jane Houlihan at Democracy Now

We launched it in 2004. It contains safety reports for 60,000 products on the market. It’s backed up by government studies and testing that give you in-depth information about what exactly is in your products. When you get online and use it, you’ll find more than 500 products that contain ingredients that are banned in other countries. You’ll find a hundred products that contain ingredients that the industry itself has said are unsafe in cosmetics. And you’ll find that 99 percent of the products you find in our database contain at least one ingredient, and many times dozens of ingredients, that haven’t been assessed for safety by the FDA, by the cosmetics industry itself, or any other publicly accountable institution.