Nina Rastogi levels a serious, and uninformed, charge in her column that the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is “overstating the science.” It seems that Nina might have fallen prey to the same deliberate disinformation from the chemical industry that has us all wondering how much we can trust products on the market, and the regulatory agencies that are supposed to protect us. The strategy, first developed by the tobacco industry and now employing some of the same people who worked on that, is to exploit the doubt that accompanies all scientific inquiry. The billion-dollar PR machine to mislead the public is so rampant that there is a Congressional investigation into one communications firm, the Weinberg Group, which was hired by the American Chemistry Council to possibly mislead the public about bisphenol A. Meanwhile, the Personal Care Products Council spends millions lobbying against regulations and trying to convince the public that it's OK for personal care products – even baby products – to contain known hazardous substances such as formaldehyde, 1,4 dioxane or lead. American companies can do better than this, and they need to do better. The science on these substances is solid, and consumers do not want to buy baby shampoo tainted with carcinogens, or lipstick laced with lead. The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics encourages consumers to check out our website, as well as all sources you can find, to learn more about the health risks of certain chemicals used in personal care products, and the availability of safer alternatives.--- Stacy Malkan, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, Author of “Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry” (New Society, 2007).

I'm glad you brought up the "doubt that accompanies all scientific inquiry," and the fact that commercial interests often exploit that uncertainty to squelch efforts at sensible regulation. Anyone who wants to know more about that topic should indeed click through your link, and read the excellent book by David Michaels. (Warning: It ain't beach reading.)

But I do think it's important to point out that the manufacturers aren't the only ones who can exploit doubt and uncertainty. Activist organizations are just as adept at what has now become a standard rhetorical gesture in the public sphere. Take the folks at the Discovery Institute, for example, who are using "Intelligent Design" theory to cast doubt upon the theory of evolution. There's no discernible commerical interest lurking behind their Christian evangelical message. Nevertheless, they have methodically emphasized every piddling inconsistency in the fossil record, and all the necessary tweaks and recalibrations we've made to Darwin's original idea.

Similarly, those dedicated greens with an evangelical bent have begun to cast skepticism and doubt from the ramparts of consumer activism: Your campaign's database of cosmetic products is just as willing to play the uncertainty game as the billion-dollar PR machine you despise.

To take just one small example: Punch into your database the name of almost any conventional shampoo, and you'll turn up a frightening "hazard" rating, and the insinuation that anyone who uses this product may be subjecting themselves to "neurotoxins," "organ system toxicity," and cancer. But a closer look reveals that most horrifying ingredient in that shampoo--the one that earns a red-highlighted, super-deadly hazard score of 8-- is "fragrance". What makes "fragrance" so dangerous? Its actual chemical constituents are unknown, and some users may be allergic to it.

It's fine to point out that our labeling laws are insufficient-- and that companies can include any number of chemicals under a generic term like "fragrance." But I'd call it grossly alarmist and irresponsible to let consumers believe that the fragrance in Head and Shoulders shampoo is likely to cause organ failure, brain death, or cancer. Have there been any documented cases of death by dandruff shampoo? If Head and Shoulders is making people sick, what kind of mortality rates are we talking about? If one in 10,000 users develops some kind of mild allergy, does that make the shampoo a "highly-hazardous" product? Or is Head and Shoulders no more a "toxin" than peanuts, milk, cochineal, or any other all-natural, organic product that produces adverse reactions in certain, unfortunate users?

I bring this up only to point out that doubt cuts both ways-- and activist groups have proven extremely adept at manipulating doubt to promote their own broad, policy goals. I'm sure Procter & Gamble would like us to take the "data gap" on their ingredients as evidence that everything is perfectly safe. But your Website invites us to see the same uncertainty as evidence that the everything is harmful and toxic. That's the message of the bright-red "hazard scores," I'm afraid. And the frightened, naval-gazing mentality that it creates-- sociologist Andrew Szasz has called it "reverse quarantine"-- strikes me as regressive and counterproductive when it comes to public health.

Hi Stacy,

Thanks for your response. One note, though: I didn't say that the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics overstates the "science"--I wrote "overstates the danger."

I wanted to stress to readers that CSC is a marketing and advocacy campaign, and that, as such, its reports have to be taken with a grain of salt--for all the reasons my colleague Dan Engber outlined above.

I hoped that Green Lantern readers would check out the CSC website--which is why I linked to it in the first place!--but also that they would remember that the material found there was created with a certain political and emotional goal in mind.

Nina

Until you can provide the medical records of people that have been proven beyond a doubt to have died of cancers caused by shampoo or face lotion, I'm not interested in anything you have to say. While the cosmetic industry may have an agenda, it's a nice clear one; they want to sell product. If the product doesn't do what it's supposed to do, it doesn't sell.

Your agenda is different and for some people, frightening. When I was teaching school, I had to contend with a bunch of 12-year-olds who were in tears after a "presentation" by some eco group who told a room full of children of many ages in an extremely serious manner complete with photographs of dead birds and rotting corpses, that they were unlikely to grow up to be adults because their parents were "killing the earth". The principal, seeing the results, sent a letter of apology to the parents of all the students. It seems that the group had seriously misrepresented themselves (they said they were going to talk about recycling) when they were discussing the content of the presentation to the school board.

Your evangelism smacks of the same alarmist twaddle. You seem unable to spread your message without hysterical fear-mongering and hurling invective at anyone who dares to disagree, which makes your group no better than the so-called christian evangelists who tell their congregations they're going to hell unless they donate money. A lot of people are willing to listen to messages of that sort but that doesn't lend it any validity. True believers seldom have anything of value to add to a discussion - all they add is hostility to those that would dare to disagree with them, no matter how reasonable the disagreement is.