Go ahead and pull out your makeup bag.
Look inside and count how many lipsticks you have.
Don’t forget the ones inside your purse, your bathroom counter and that emergency stick inside your car.
Is it more than 10? 20? 30?
With all this lipstick it is no wonder that women consume 4 – 7 lbs of lipstick over a lifetime!
With your lipstick being a part of your daily diet, do you have any idea of what is inside of it?
We found the formula that makes up most lipsticks and the answers were not very pleasant.
Let’s start with the basics
A single lipstick contains several hundred different chemical compounds to give it the desired color, glossiness, and indelibility. And while ingredients will differ between brands, there are a number of essential ingredients, according to Bournemouth-based teacher Andy Brunning who is the author of the blog, Compound Interest.
So what are some of the ingredients?
As you see above there are a great deal of ingredients to create typical lipsticks but what about a particular shade like fire engine red? Here are a few ingredients that are used to create the perfect pout.
Cochineal beetles
Cochineal beetles, otherwise known as “carmine,” “natural red 4,” or “crimson lake”, are a parasitic beetle native to Mexico and South America whose crushed remains are used as a coloring agent.
These ground-up bug carcasses can also be found in Starbucks Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos and red velvet whoopee pies.
Delicious!
Capsaicin
Interestingly, capsaicin, the major capsaicinoid compound in chillis which is largely responsible for spiciness, can also sometimes be found in lipsticks. Its presence is down to its ability to act as a minor skin irritant, which means it can cause lips to appear plumper.
Titanium dioxide
Titanium dioxide is used in a variety of personal care products, including sunscreens, pressed and loose powders. It is a very effective UV filter, and of low risk in creams. However, when titanium dioxide is inhalable, as it is in loose powders, it is considered a possible carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
Dr. Mercola expresses concerns about products using titanium dioxide as nanoparticles as they are ultramicroscopic in size, making them able to readily penetrate your skin and travel to underlying blood vessels and your bloodstream.
Evidence suggests that some nanoparticles may induce toxic effects in your brain and cause nerve damage.
In recent years there has been concern over the very small amounts of heavy metals that can be found in some lipsticks. A recent study of 32 popular lipsticks found trace contaminant amounts of lead, cadmium, aluminium, chromium and manganese in many of them. However, this study has come in for criticism in some quarters, as it based its human ingestion estimates on a range of different data for each metal, and also assessed the amounts ingested with the assumption that all of the applied lipstick was ingested.
The presence of heavy metals in lipsticks is still a legitimate concern, however, particularly with no safe level of exposure to lead being recognized, and as such there is a push for a limit of specific levels of the metals in lipstick to be set.
