Women Have Been Using Cosmetics for Thousands of Years

Women have been using cosmetics for thousands of years to define our ideal of beauty and some of our choices have been questionable at best. Just looking at the history of makeup we can see some of the crazy things we have done for beauty.

Our products didn't start out with all these chemicals but as cosmetics began to be manufactured on a large scale chemicals have been increasingly added through the years to preserve, stabilize and improve our makeup creating a product that was cheaper, with a long shelf life and may have worked well but could hardly be considered natural.

With so many new chemicals and other ingredients being used in skin care products it is necessary to do some some kind of testing to determine safety and animal testing became a cheap, easy way to do that. Many companies have found that this form of testing is not necessary any more but some of our most popular brands of cosmetics still have not come to the same conclusion.

These tests may have told us a particular ingredient was safe under certain conditions but no one can test for all the possible combinations of chemicals we are exposed to everyday and since testing is strictly voluntary for cosmetic companies not all ingredients are thoroughly tested. In fact only about 10% of the synthetic ingredients used have actually been tested.