How to choose nail polish
Nail polish is a little bottle of interesting ingredients.
I stopped wearing nail polish some five years ago. I felt that the smell, which I find is over-powering, had to be from something toxic as I often would find my eyes hurt, throat was sore and nails stung when painting them, not really a good advert for a beauty regime! Alarm bells rung and, seemingly, rightly so.
According to a recent article, by Pat Thomas, former editor of The Ecologist, nail polish has three main ingredients to be wary of "dibutyl phthalate, toluene compounds and formaldehyde." Dibutyl phthalate (DBP) is an ingredient that has been in nail polishes for a long time and is apparently banned in Europe. Other ingredients found in many nail polishes are toulene which is a skin irritant and toxic to the nervous system and formaldehyde. Nail polishes can have polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) which is Teflon and I recommend avoiding non-stick cooking pans!
European
and North American cosmetic and skin care product safety standards
differ considerably and even eco-friendly nail polishes can harbour
ingredients that I
would not wish to use on my body.
What about the nail polish remover?
I met a beauty therapist last week, who had lost the top layers of skin on her thumb, literally her thumb print was gone and there was a flap of skin hanging. I (perhaps rather impertinently) inquired how this injury had happened. The girl replied that she was doing a pedicure and the nail polish remover had, she thinks, caused some sort of reaction with her skin. This girl is hugely blessed that she doesn't have a nasty infection on her thumb. The acetone, and ethyl acetate which is often present in nail polish removers, can be hugely drying to the skin and it appears that some ingredient was so drying that the therapist's skin dried quite severely.
It is important now, more than ever, to start being an ingredient detective as education and awareness are the only ways we can change an industry that uses toxic ingredients, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), in nail products and relies on lax labelling laws to continue.
Pat Thomas reports that in her article Behind the Label: Nail Polish "As an adult you really only have two choices: don't use nail polish, or use it and accept that it is a toxic mix." I couldn't agree more with Pat, and I chose to stop painting my nails!
Tags: nail polish, formaldehyde, VOCs, synthetic chemicals, toxins