just an asterisk

It’s not exactly tech-related, but it is a website so we’ll just post this under Random… GoodGuide is a site that reviews the data on popular products that we use everyday.  I can’t vouch for the source of the data – it looks respectable, but it’s difficult to tell exactly who did the work.  The site explanation can be found here.  That said, I had a bit of a chill when I found out that my favorite facial moisturizer (laugh all you want…) has a rating of “Terrible”.

Looking further into the issue, it seems that my product has several data “gaps”.  When you click on the product rating, you’re taken to another site called SkinDeep, which focuses only on the data for cosmetics.  Here is a snippet of what I learned.

It seems that the active ingredient is OXYBENZONE (BENZOPHENONE-3) for which there is a 53% uncertainty (or gap) in their knowledge.  For the fragrance, SkinDeep claims that it’s a rating of 8 (meaning really, really bad) but asserts 100% uncertainty for this value.  For water, just to provide a reference, they (thankfully) say there is 0% uncertainty.

The summary here, is that I’m a bit confused – It would seem to me that 53% certainty is pretty bad and 100% is just plain pathetic.  Am I reading the data correctly?  Well according to their site:

“The "data gap" rating is a measure of how much is unknown about an ingredient. Not all ingredients have the same amount of safety data. For example, some ingredients may appear to have low hazards, but this may be due to the fact that they have not have been studied or assessed completely. Other ingredients may appear to have low hazards and have been thoroughly studied or assessed. This score helps differentiate between ingredients and products that have been studied to different degrees.”

So I’m reading the data correctly and some of the ingredients may not be as bad, per se.  Even with that slight reassurance, I find myself wondering how companies get away with selling products like this?  I would have thought that more would be done to prevent cancer causing materials (even with 53% uncertainty) from being sold to the general public… Perhaps I’m just naive.  A diatribe on this subject is not the stuff of Just an Asterisk, but be sure that I’d love to write one…

My advice:  Visit the site, take a look at your products you use everyday and make your own opinion.  As for me, I’m changing my skin cream to something that won’t stop me from having children – a fact that I want to be able to support with 0% uncertainty.

Stay safe,

~ab

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 19th, 2009 at 4:44 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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