If you are at all health-conscious or concerned with the amount of chemicals in American food, you probably read labels in the grocery store. And you probably try to avoid processed foods with unpronounceable ingredients. Good for you.

But alas, it seems there are toxins—carcinogenic, birth defect-causing toxins—in makeup, beauty products and standard personal hygiene stuff like toothpaste, deodorant and soap. Even Johnson's baby shampoo contains a known carcinogen, says Stacy Malkan, co-founder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. The organization, along with the Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Connecticut, held a panel at Yale last week on the safety of cosmetics and personal care products.

Also speaking were Paul Anastas, the father of green chemistry; Gary Ginsberg, a toxicologist; and Dawyn-Cloud Alter, an herbalist who owns a natural beauty products line. It was a frightening night. Ginsberg, who teaches at Yale and the UConn Medical Center, described the effects of phthalates, a family of plasticizers used in things like hairspray and fragrance to make them cling to the body.

The phrase "malformation of the penis" was used.

Ginsberg says men exposed to the chemicals as fetuses are more likely to have smaller penises, lower sperm counts and shortened anogenital distance.

"What we tell pregnant women is, 'Don't use cosmetics. Don't use personal care products,'" he says. Although some companies, like Whole Foods, do want to get phthalates out of their products, "it is not simple," he says.

What seemed most troubling for the panelists was that these ingredients—cancer-causing and penis-mangling as they are—are not illegal in the United States. Although the federal Food and Drug Administration has some oversight over the cosmetics and toiletries industry, it does not check the safety of products or have authority to keep them off shelves. There's a list of about seven banned ingredients, including chloroform, but that's it.

"The FDA is not picking up the lead here," Ginsberg says. The European Union, by contrast, passed a law in 2004 banning more than 10,000 chemicals. Part of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics' mission is getting companies to sign a pledge saying they will comply with the more stringent EU standards.

So far, although close to 800 companies have signed, the campaign has yet to secure the largest ones: L'Oreal, Estee Lauder, Procter & Gamble, Revlon and Avon. (L'Oreal, for one, claims its products comply with EU laws no matter where they are sold.)

The makeup and toiletries industries, as well as the FDA, say chemicals such as 1,4-dioxin, which is found in things like baby wash, are only harmful at large doses. But studies are showing that such substances might cause damage even in small doses, if one is exposed over a long period of time or at a sensitive stage of development.

It's troubling, especially when the American Cancer Society says about one in two men and one in three women will develop cancer in their lifetime.

But Anastas, director of Yale's Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering, offers some hope. As a chemist, he says, he understands how chemicals get into the body and what they do when they get there; how everyone in the room had upwards of 200 chemicals accumulating in their bodies; and the current "impotence" of the FDA. And yet he's still optimistic, he says, because the same technology that poisons us could save us.

"Every day 4,000 new chemicals are invented or discovered. There is plenty of room for innovation...Change is not only possible, it's inevitable," he says. As chemistry advances, he adds, scientists are learning how to design substances to be nontoxic from the get-go.

"I'm a strategic optimist. I don't believe everything will just be OK. I believe everything can be OK" if we keep working, Anastas says. "For so long the myth has been, we can't have products of modern life without these toxic chemicals."

But that's changing, he says, as more companies feel pressure to create safe products.

Alter, the herbalist, encouraged the audience to be careful when they shop. She pointed out that even toothpaste has a warning, urging those who swallow too much to call Poison Control. That, she says, isn't right.

There are ways to avoid these chemicals, if you put some time in. The Environmental Working Group's cosmetics safety database is online and searchable by product, company and ingredient at cosmeticsdatabase.com. You can view which companies have signed the campaign's pledge at its website, safecosmetics.org.

editor@newhavenadvocate.com