Mary Kay – home of the pink Cadillac and many things pink — is going green.

Mary Kay headquarters in Addison, near Dallas

Turns out the skin care and cosmetics mega sales business that was born in 1963 and elevated and launched the career of the at-home beauty consultant has an environmental bent.

The company recycles compacts, builds nature classrooms at domestic violence shelters and for the past 20 years has been moving the culture at MK towards a greener future.

Crayton Webb, director of corporate responsibility, says Mary Kay Inc. was one of the first corporations in the U.S. to have internal recycling, as early as the late ‘80s.

“Our president at the time was Dick Bartlett, who believed that it made good sense for a business to be good stewards for the environment,” says Webb. “What we do today affects future generations.” Founder Mary Kay Ash also believed in doing well by doing good, Webb says.

A Mary Kay compact that can be customized.

In 2008, the global company, based in Addison, Texas outside of Dallas, introduced a new compact. But staff fretted about what women would do with their old ones. In keeping with the company’s new sustainability initiative, Mary Kay put together a compact on compacts — making compact recycling a part of its larger recycling program called Pink Doing Green. The makeup consultants brought old compacts to company events to be recycled. The compacts were broken apart and the end products went to a recycling contractor, thus avoiding the landfill.

“For every one we got back,” says Webb, “we planted a tree.” The company had partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation, the nonprofit conservation group whose mission is to nurture trees. Webb says the goal was for 200,000 compacts to be collected, but they received 300,000 by the end of last year, when the program ended.

As a result the company planted 200,000 trees in the Bitterroot National Forest in Montana. “It’s more than planting a tree,” says Janelle O’Haugherty, manager for corporate communication. “This area had been destroyed by fire. We are restoring the benefits that trees provide.” The reforestation will help clean the air and water and resore important environmental benefits to the area, said John Rosenow, chief executive and founder of the Arbor Day Foundation.

Mary Kay, which had worldwide sales of $2.6 billion in 2008 and operates in 35 markets around the globe, also recommends that women refill their compacts. The company suggests that women buy a compact for the long term and then reuse it with refills.

A Mary Kay "Nature Explore Outdoor Classroom" at Shelter Our Sisters in Hackensack, N.J.

Mary Kay’s involvement with the Nature Explore Classrooms and domestic violence shelters evolved from the company’s longtime interest in domestic violence. Mary Kay’s workforce and clientele are predominantly women and domestic violence is an issue the company takes  seriously. Statistics show, says Webb, that one in three women are affected by domestic violence at some point in their lives.

Since 2000, the Mary Kay Foundation has donated $22 million to shelters. (The foundation also contributes to causes fighting cancers affecting women.)

The concept of a nature classroom evolved much like music therapy which has been shown to improve kids’ outlook. “Nature is therapeutic to abused kids,” Webb says. “The nature classrooms were created as safe, fun places where kids could learn, play and heal from abuse at home.” Nature has been shown to lessen stress on kids who have faced adverse situations.The Arbor Day Foundation also partnered with Mary Kay on this project.

“These are not just playgrounds,” says O’Haugherty. “There is a curriculum, music, planting, digging and a lot of learning about nature that goes on.”

The company has built five nature classrooms so far. They are located in Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas and Hackensack, N.J. In October 2009, the classrooms opened in Chicago, Hackensack and Atlanta. The ones in LA and Dallas will open in the first quarter of this year.

“As an organization, we believe that violence against women is simple unacceptable,” said Anne Crews last October during Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Crews is vice president of government relations for Mary Kay Inc. and a board member for the Mary Kay Foundation. “We know that helping women and children connect with nature during the healing process will empower them.”

Mary Kay’s hope, Webb adds, “is that these children have the opportunity to heal. If the nature classroom can play some small role in what they do, we’ve done our job,” he says. “It’s more than just writing a check.”

In addition to the compact recycling and nature classrooms, Mary Kay has introduced green initiatives in its Addison-based headquarters. Just by turning off the lights when leaving the office, Webb says the company has reduced its energy consumption by 13 percent. There are motion sensors in the offices and conference rooms that automatically go out after people leave the room.

Initially, says Webb, some employees were resistant because they didn’t want their colleagues to think they had gone home early. “So we created door hangers,” says Webb, “that said: ‘I’m in today. My lights are out to be green.’”

At Mary Kay’s distribution and packaging facilities, bio-peanuts are now used as the packing materials. They are made of corn and potato starch and can either be re-used or dissolve in water. Mary Kay uses product cartons made of recycled paperboard; the packaging of their individual products uses post consumer content, varying from product to product – in some cases up to 35 percent.

At its global manufacturing facility in Dallas, Webb says, 13 tons of alcohol waste is now being removed, reducing Mary Kay’s annual hazardous waste output by 25 percent.

Mary Kay, which is sold by 2 million Mary Kay consultants around the world,  has also been the recipient of the Dallas Blue Thumb Award for water conservation for several years, thanks to its reduced water use.

“We’re not perfect,” Webb says.  “There’s so much more that can be done. We don’t want to brag. It’s part of our responsibility.”

Copyright © 2010 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Squint and you can’t see them. Try a standard microscope. They’re still not there.

And yet, they’re everywhere. Nanoparticles are in hundreds, if not thousands, of consumer products, from sunscreen to child car seats to sports socks.

So the EPA has decided to take a closer look at these eensy particles, to investigate their potential to harm humans and the environment.

Nanos, which are about 1/100,000 of the width of a human hair and have been aggregating in consumer goods faster than E coli at a feed lot, have raised concerns among environmentalists, public health officials and others. These guardians of the environment want to know more about how nanos act in water, air and soil, and also whether they can invade and damage human tissue.

Nanoparticles are many times smaller than even a blood cell, and therefore can cross cellular barriers in the human body. Questions remain about whether and how much nanos can damage human tissue.

The study of nanos and their effects has often been done behind closed doors in the private labs of consumer companies. A European survey of companies making products using nanoparticles (done by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work) found that only 8 percent had conducted testing to examine the potential effects on workers.

In the US, the EPA wants more information about using nanos safely in consumer products, and also about the positive prospects for using nanoparticles to clean up the environment.

Rice University, for instance, has been studying using nanoparticles to clean up oil spills by capturing oil particles in water droplets.

The EPA notes that some studies show sunscreens with nanoparticles “provide superior protection against UV radiation.”

Some environmentalists dispute that claim, saying that nanos in sunscreens are dangerous and may actually have the opposite of the desired effect, aging skin instead of protecting it by introducing free radicals. (See our story Don’t get burned, use sunscreens without nanoparticles, which contains a list of  cosmetic makers who have so far kept nanos out of their sunscreen.)

The EPA wants to sort out the good and the bad, identifying any hazards presented by nanos and promoting steps to minimize risks, according to a press release this week.

Researchers are investigating “widely used nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes” that are used in vehicles, sports equipment, electronics and titanium dioxide, the key ingredient in many sunscreens as well as skin cosmetics.

• See the EPA’s nanotechnology website for more information.

• The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health also maintains a nanoparticle info site, with archived articles and research about the potential occupational exposure to, and health effects of, nanos.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

BestinBeauty.com is an information site and store all rolled into one. Co-founder Tara Lee founded the site after spending twelve years in the entertainment business, where she was shocked by the levels of toxic chemicals in make-up and beauty products.

The company recently launched a campaign Labels for Life, in order to raise awareness about toxic chemicals in makeup. The campaign’s slogan is a phrase designed to help you read labels when shopping for make-up. “Pretty products for healthy people minus

many lousy chemical substances.” Each word in the slogan corresponds with a chemical that can be left out of make-up. For example, minus turns into mercury (mercurous chloride) which is still used in some mascaras. Lousy stands for lead which can be found in some lipsticks.

The list of chemicals can be found in a range of products, not just make-up. The chemicals on the list can be found in shampoos and conditioners, nail polish and deodorant. The ultimate goal of the website is to encourage consumers to read the product label, just as they would if they were eating a product. Checking out the nutritional facts can scare many people away from sugary sodas, and reading the product information just might scare people into using natural beauty products. Check out the list of chemicals and read how they affect the body.

The site also is calling on action from the FDA. The Food and Drug Administration sets the standards for regulations in the United States for the manufacture of food and drugs, which includes cosmetics. The website is currently calling for more strict guidelines in the chemicals and materials that can be use in beauty products.

Many of the chemicals used in beauty products have already been banned from other products. Lead has been banned from use in paint in children’s toys, but is currently still used for coloring in lipstick in some products.

The shopping section of the site offers chemical-free alternatives to make-up, shampoos, fragrance and skin care products.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

Nanoparticles used in sunscreens and cosmetics may be harmful to the environment, according to U.S. scientists who have been studying the effects of nanos on living organisms.

Two separate studies, by researchers at the University of Toledo and at Utah State University and the University of Utah, found that the nanoparticles had powerful harmful effects on bacteria and a certain type of beneficial soil microbes.

The findings, released this week, were reported at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City. They are likely to fuel debate over the safe use of nanoparticles and concerns that consumers lack important information about the nano-engineering behind hundreds of personal care products already on the market.

“We have no assurance that they’re effective and we have no assurance that they’re safe either,” said Ian Illuminato, an advocate with Friends of the Earth, which wants the U.S. to require disclosure on products using nanoparticles.

While nanotechnology is a “very exciting field” certain to catapult many scientific advancements, there are still problems with using nanoparticles for consumables at this early juncture, Illuminato said.

“More and more studies are raising red flags,” showing that nanoparticles used in personal products can cross into body tissues, where their effects are largely unexplored. Once study with pregnant lab mice showed that exposure to nano titanium dioxide crossed the placental barrier, producing brain damage in the offspring, he said.

This week, the European Union voted to tighten safety testing requirements for personal products made with nanoparticles and to require labeling of consumer goods with nanoparticles. The new rules go into effect in 2012.

One of the two studies released in Salt Lake City this week looked at nano-titanium dioxide — used in regular and nano-versions in sunscreens and skin products that advertise sunscreen protection because it can block UV rays. In the  study, Dr. Cyndee Gruden, of the University of Toledo, and colleague Olga Mileyeva-Biebesheimer , found that nano-titanium dioxide (nano-TiO2) quickly killed Escherichia coli (E.coli) in lab cultures.

“How fast the impact was surprised me,” she said in a news release. Gruden’s concern:  What happens when nano-particles from personal products are rinsed away and end up in water supplies. “When they enter a lake, what happens?  Would they enter an organism or bind to it? Maybe they kill it – or have nothing to do with it at all…Right now, we’re not really sure of the answers.”

In the other study of nanotoxicity, Utah scientists Anne Anderson and colleagues inserted a newly developed nano-detecting “biosensor” into the Pseudomonas putida (P. putida) soil microbe.

They found that the microbe, which is considered a beneficial soil organism, could not “tolerate” the intrusion of silver, copper oxide or zinc oxide nanoparticles. The biosensor provided the evidence, showing that the microbes exposed to the nanoparticles dimmed compared with the unexposed microbes, which glowed brightly when healthy.

My tweener daughter has often patiently explained to me that there are “girly girls” and “Tom Boys” and variations in between. I guess she figures that in the century when I grew up that wasn’t the case, or possibly that my girlhood is so far gone, it can’t even be imagined! I need to be brought up to speed.

As her tutorial goes, “girly girls” need to dress girlishly and primp with lip gloss, cologne and smell-nice body lotions. Tom Boys, not so much.

As her mom, I want her to be a Shiny Happy Female, but my green side ends up questioning all this girlish goop-la.

Scientists have been sounding alarms about suspicious ingredients in shampoo, lotions and cosmetics for many years and being an obsessive label reader, I’ve tended to agree that it might be worthwhile to deconstruct these labels with their gazillion unpronounceable preservatives, sudsing agents, flavorings and fragrances.

Can a product containing PPG-2 hydroxyethlcoco/isostearmide be completely safe? Not being a chemist, I really don’t know, and I imagine that’s where a lot of us land: wary of this onslaught of chemicals, but without sufficient knowledge to sort it out.

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington-based watchdog organization concerned with toxins in our everyday lives, can help. You can gather info on the products you use by consulting the EWG database Skin Deep. The online tool – which includes some 25,000 products — can show you whether your body lotion, mascara or hair conditioner is rated as low, medium or high toxicity. It identifies the chemicals that are noxious; tells how they are potentially dangerous (carcinogen vs. skin irritant, say) and shows the level of research that’s been done.

Recently, the EWG took another stab at raising public awareness about toxins in personal products, conducting a unique study of teen girls in which researchers found 16 harmful chemicals, many traceable to beauty products, in the urine and blood samples of 20 volunteers, ages 14-20.

Chemist and EWG researcher Rebecca Sutton, who crafted the study, obligingly identified some of the key questionable ingredients to watch for:

Triclosan – This anti-microbial has been melded into a vast array of consumer goods. It’s common in “anti-bacterial” hand soaps, but also turns up in deodorants, acne washes, toothpaste, and in hard goods like shower curtains and pillows marketed as “anti-microbial.”

According to Sutton, manufacturers are doing us no great favors with this chemical, which has been associated with a higher risk of thyroid problems in humans, is a suspected hormone disrupter (especially of concern to growing kids) and is not environmentally friendly, persisting in groundwater. Triclosan also has been accused of fostering antibiotic-resistance in germs. In any event, studies with hand soaps show that Triclosan works no better than regular soap and water to fight germs, says Dr. Sutton (among others).

Phthalates – These chemicals, which are used as plasticizers (to make items more flexible) and as preservatives, are ominously present in many beauty products, concealed by the term “fragrance,” and not required to be disclosed on labels, Sutton says. They are used to make the fragrance in the product last longer, or absorb better, on the skin.

“Because these products are hidden by the term ‘fragrance’ (on the label), you don’t even know what you’re getting…And they are dangerous,” Dr. Sutton said.

One analysis of fragrances and scented body care products found that phthalates were present, but not listed, in 75 percent of the items tested.

Phthalates also are found in nail polishes containing dibutyl phthalate, used as an anti-chipping additive and in bendable plastic baby toys, prompting California to ban their use in plastic products starting in 2009.

Studies have found that phthalates interfere with the reproductive and endocrine systems and they’ve been implicated in diabetes and infertility. For more info see the EWG posting Cosmetic Chemicals of Concern.

The American Chemistry Council, the trade group representing manufacturers, disputes claims that phthalates pose any danger, even in baby toys, noting in a recent release that they are “among the most thoroughly studied products in the world, and have been reviewed by multiple regulatory bodies in the U.S. and overseas.

Musks – These synthetic scents added to personal care products – and household items like laundry detergent, also may act as endocrine disruptors. Like phthalates, they are not listed separately on items, but fall under the umbrella term “fragrance.”

Musks can build up in the body and may impair one’s defenses to toxins. Some studies have linked these synthetic fragrance additives to cancer development. “Nitromusks” have been banned by the European Union because of health concerns. Experts advise choosing fragrance-free products and avoid using air fresheners to minimize the risk, which is still under study.

Parabens – You’ve probably heard of parabens, preservatives that turn up in an array of body care products – moisturizers, lotions, shampoos and sunscreens. They can be a skin irritant, but of more concern is their tendency to mimic estrogen, causing researchers to look into their possible role in breast cancer and reproductive problems. Parabens are regulated as food additives, but not in cosmetics, by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration.

Fortunately, the problems posed by these chemicals, have some ready solutions.

Dr. Sutton, who found that the teen girls in her study used an average of 17 beauty products compared with the 12 used by adult women, advises young girls is to simply cut down on the number of beauty items in their feminine arsenal.

Girls (and guys for that matter) also can switch to alternative products that avoid the use of phthalates, parabens and Triclosan. Store shelves are becoming stocked with an array of natural, plant-based products that eschew these synthetic additives. Many proclaim on their labels that they are free of parabens and phthalates. Some eschew the use of sodium lauryl sulfate or sodium laureth sulfate, cleansing/sudsing agent used in industrial cleaning products but which can irritate the skin, according to some research.

What’s more, this niche market is growing. Many of these natural products are coming down in price and are more widely distributed than ever. We found several botanically scented, chemical-free (or nearly chemical free) choices at our local health food market, but also at Target, Ulta and Drugstore.com. For our next blog we’ll present a grab bag of natural products (can you say Yes to Carrots?) that we put to the home test, showing you a sampling of those we found to be sweet-smelling, affordable and effective.

Some not so pretty news out about cosmetics this week shows that teen girls tested for chemical exposure from beauty products had become human repositories of parabens, phthalates, triclosan and musks.

These chemicals, some of which are hormone disruptors or have been linked to cancer, turned up in the blood and urine of 20 teenage girls tested by the Environmental Working Group.

On average, the girls, ages 14-19, tested positive for 13 hormone-disrupting chemicals each. Parabens, commonly used as cosmetic preservatives, were detected in every girl tested.

While it remains unclear how dangerous these toxins, absorbed in minute amounts, really are, scientists worry that their effects could compound over time.

The study found that the participating teen girls used some 17 products every day, more than even adult women (who average 12 products in a day), raising their cumulative exposure to these potentially harmful substances at a time when their reproductive, immune, metabolic and adrenal systems are maturing.

“Emerging research suggest that teens may be particularly sensitive to exposures to trace levels of hormone-disrupting chemicals like the ones targeted in this study,” noted the EWG news release.

The EWG, a non-profit based in Washington, called for the federal government to set safety standards for cosmetics, which include many ingredients that are not tested by any independent agency. The group advised teens to:

• Reduce the number of beauty products they use

• Use paraben-free skin products, shampoos and sunscreens. Parabens can mimic estrogen, interfering with reproductive health and some studies have linked them to breast cancer.

• Seek out fragrance-free beauty products to reduce exposure to musks, which may disturb the body’s ability to fend off toxins; and to reduce exposure to phthalates, linked to a host of medical problems including infertility issues.

• Avoid products labeled “antibacterial” particularly hand soaps with triclosan listed as an active ingredient on the label. Switch to an alcohol hand rub or use regular soap and water instead. Triclosan has been found to disrupt the thyroid system, which can affect brain development in the young, and is suspected of contributing to the development super-strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

• Use the EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to inform your product choices. EWG also maintains the public Skin Deep database to help consumers find safer products.

To learn more about the uses and effects of the chemicals tested, see the EWG’s notes on phthalates, triclosan, parabens and musks, and the detailed report on the study.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media