EWG board member Michelle Pfeiffer met with federal lawmakers today to urge them to support bipartisan legislation to reform a woefully outdated law governing the cosmetics industry.
The actress and environmentalist recently launched the first-ever fine fragrance line that is entirely transparent in disclosing its ingredients. Henry Rose is a new collection of five distinct scents that meets EWG's rigorous criteria for health, ingredient disclosure and transparency, making it the first fine fragrance line to earn the EWG VERIFIED™ mark.
Pfeiffer and fellow board member and EWG President Ken Cook went to Capitol Hill to build support for the Personal Care Product Safety Act, a bipartisan bill by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Their proposal would modernize how the Food and Drug Administration regulates personal care products by giving the FDA the tools it needs to protect the public.
Currently, cosmetics companies do not have to register with the FDA, submit cosmetic ingredient statements, adopt good manufacturing practices, provide access to safety records or report serious adverse events when they occur. The agency also does not have the authority to recall contaminated personal care products – even if a company fails to voluntarily act to remove a product from store shelves.
"Thanks to Sens. Feinstein and Collins and other congressional leaders for taking on such an important and overdue cause to clean up the cosmetics industry," Pfeiffer said. "Companies should not be allowed to use hazardous ingredients in products people use and apply to their skin every day. As a parent, I am particularly concerned about the ingredients in products marketed toward infants and children. Parents and expectant parents deserve to know that the soaps, lotions and other products they put on their kids' skin is free of toxic chemicals."
"Michelle first found EWG after doing her own research about what products were the safest for her family, and no one is more committed to seeing these much-needed reforms by Sens. Feinstein and Collins become law," said Cook. "EWG has advocated for new federal cosmetics industry standards for nearly 20 years, and it feels like the moment is upon us. EWG and all of our supporters are grateful for the tireless leadership of Sens. Feinstein and Collins, Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, and others for getting us to this critical point."
Pfeiffer's commitment to cleaning up the personal care and cosmetics industries goes beyond her lobbying in support of policy reforms in Washington.
To see how toxic or non-toxic your beauty products are, visit: https://www.ewg.org
