SAFE FOR SKIN? Unlike food or drugs, cosmetics aren't required to be approved before they hit the shelves--or your skin.
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Editor's Note: This story is part of an In-Depth Report on the science of beauty. Read more about the series here.

Cosmetics—makeup, creams, fragrances—have been around for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptian and Roman women famously caked on lead-based foundation. (Lead, a metal, can cause nerve, muscle and organ damage.) But surely lead-laden cosmetics have been phased out along with lead-lined water pipes, right? Not necessarily.

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversees the multi-billion-dollar-a-year cosmetics industry but it lacks the power to approve products or ingredients before they hit store shelves, even though their contents have been shown to enter the body.

According to the FDA, a cosmetic is anything used for "cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness or altering the appearance." An average U.S. consumer uses about 10 cosmetic products every day, including makeup, soap, shampoo, lotion, hair gel and cologne, says Lisa Archer, the national coordinator for The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (CSC), a nonprofit advocacy group based in San Francisco and financed in part by the Breast Cancer Fund, a nonprofit organization. As a result, she says, people are exposed to roughly 126 different chemicals daily, many of which haven't been thoroughly tested.

"We're operating in a vacuum in terms of safety," Archer says. "The FDA doesn't even define what 'safe' is, so it's totally up to the discretion of cosmetic companies."

Soaking it in
Slathering, powdering, spritzing. The skin is the body's largest organ and its shield against the surrounding environment. But it is a porous protector, allowing some substances in and others—most notably moisture—out. Some compounds that are applied to the skin's surface can be absorbed into the body, including the estimated four pounds (1.8 kilograms) of lipstick an average lipstick-wearer consumes in a lifetime, according to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a nonprofit public interest organization based in Washington, D.C.

As chemistry has ramped up in the past century, ingredients in cosmetics have become increasingly complex and cutting-edge. But "there's no need," Archer says, for some potentially harmful chemicals now in cosmetics to be in the mix. Among those that should be nixed, the CSC says: formaldehyde (a known carcinogen that's used as a preservative) and 1,4-dioxane (an industrial solvent or foaming agent that is a suspected carcinogen).

Archer notes that some other ingredients in cosmetics may be benign in one state but toxic in others. For example, titanium dioxide (a naturally occurring mineral often used as a pigment or thickener) is considered to be safe when put into a viscous mixture, such as in sunscreen or toothpaste. But in powder form, such as in mineral makeup powders, it can cause cancer when inhaled, according to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the World Health Organization).