The feeling that modern life is making us sick is now so accepted that to express the sentiment is cliché.

Indeed, it is arguable that anxieties about the dangers of our synthetic lifestyle have become so accepted that they are now as comforting as any other recurring symbol within the cultural landscape.

Thanks to Hollywood movies and Coupland novels, news coverage of the risks of DDT and crop spraying, genetic modification and scares over tainted meat, we now understand that many of the chemicals that have been enlisted by strangers in lab coats to help make our lives easier may have vile side-effects.

But yet, when an ingredient found in all of our shampoos and bubble baths gets proven to cause cancers in mammals manufacturers are, normally, not impeached to remove it.

Why? Well, firstly, this information is normally hidden in relatively esoteric journals – the newspapers and TV stations are bored of reporting that ingredient x or y has been proven to cause skin irritations, or headaches or dizziness or narcosis or damage to the liver and kidneys – and with our media reliant on advertising revenue the decision to not run stories exposing products full of poisons is a purely economic one.
Occasionally the known health risks of an ingredient outweigh the corporations ugly scramble for profits, and they get regulated or banned altogether. In Europe diethanolamine (DEA), monoethanolamine (MEA) and triethanolamine (TEA) have all been restricted because they have been proven to cause bad allergic reactions in the eyes, skin and hair. In addition they are known to cause amines to react and form nitrosamines if they come into contact with nitrosating agents. Nitrosating agents, are of course, highly carcinogenic, and DEA MEA and TEA have all been proven to increase instances of liver and kidney cancer.

Whilst the use of this terrible trio of nasty chemicals is now restricted, there are other common ingredients that have been proven to bring bad tidings to the body, and the only reason that they continue to be used is because they are cheap, thereby allowing the companies to spend their money on what is important in today’s market – branding.
When we purchase an SLS infused shampoo for example, we are increasing our risk of cancer in order that the corporation making that product can maximise their profit margin, and pay some advertising company to come up with a green-washed branding message to disguise the product’s industrial rather than homely reality.

SLS (Sodium Lauryl Sulphate) is used to decrease car engines, among other things. It can be found in just about every product that foams or bubbles and, as a nitrosating agent, is carcinogenic. It is not natural, it is manmade and its presence in any product that is branded to look natural or ‘gentle’ should be considered to undermine that message.

Of course, one hundred years people were not exposed to these risks, but neither were they able to benefit from the wide range of cosmetics and skin care products that we can today. However, an increasing number of companies are now focusing on using their knowledge to produce all natural skincare products that avoid containing chemicals like MEA and DEA and the other thousands like them.