Women take on cosmetics industry
It began more than a decade ago with four women who wondered whether the hair spray, perfume and shampoo they were using every day were safe.
Their quest to find an answer led them to their neighborhood drugstores, where they spent hours reading the labels on beauty products. What they read disturbed them: lists of chemicals and ingredients whose names they couldn't pronounce.
This bootstrap effort grew into a national movement -- the San Francisco-based Campaign for Safe Cosmetics -- that has transformed the way consumers shop for personal care items, pushed the cosmetics industry to change the way it makes products, pressured lawmakers to call for more oversight and moved Walmart, the world's largest retailer,
Stacy Malkan, left, and Janet Nudelman, co-founders of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, pose for a photograph, Monday, Oct. 7, 2013 in Oakland, Calif. The women have, through a decade of product testing, petitioning and other campaigning, coerced both WalMart and Target stores into re-examining the contents of their cosmetic products, and pressing manufacturers to eliminate toxic ingredients. (D. Ross Cameron/Bay Area News Group) ( D. ROSS CAMERON )
to announce a policy last month banning some harmful chemicals from beauty merchandise.
"They really moved the needle on this," Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at UC San Francisco, said of the campaign. "The way that we think about cosmetics and chemicals has changed because of the work that they did."
After setting up its headquarters in 2004 in the heart of San Francisco, the group tapped into one of the country's most environmentally progressive areas, finding allies among the activist groups here and a political climate that embraced toxic chemical regulations. The campaign launched the first large-scale grass-roots challenge to the country's $60 billion beauty products industry, and in 2005 helped drive passage of California's Safe Cosmetics Act -- still the only law of its kind in the country -- that requires cosmetic companies to disclose to public health officials the ingredients in their products sold in California.
"The fact the (campaign) is housed in the Bay Area has everything to do with the success that we've had over the past decade," said Janet Nudelman, an early leader in the safe cosmetics movement and program director at the Breast Cancer
