Healing Dry Sensitive Skin

Susan starts her day by jogging to the edge of town, cutting back through a cornfield for an herbal tea at the downtown Starbucks and heading home for a shower. It sounds like a healthy morning routine, but Susan is in fact exposing herself to a rogue’s gallery of chemicals: pesticides and herbicides on the corn, plasticizers in her tea cup, and the wide array of ingredients used to perfume her soap and enhance the performance of her shampoo and moisturizer. Most of these exposures are so low as to be considered trivial, but they are not trivial at all—especially considering that Susan is six weeks pregnant.

Have you read the ingredients in the products you put onto your skin everyday – the soap, lotions, cosmetics, all of them? It is amazing how much junk is in them, and some even have chemicals that are known to be harmful to the skin. Even the most commonly prescribed cream for treating eczema contains a chemical proven to make eczema worse! It is good to see Scientific American publishing articles like this. Used to just be “health nuts” who were concerned about the spread of toxic chemicals into our everyday lives.