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« A bright kind of proposal | Main | Parts is parts »
Prom dresses, tiaras and combat boots
By guest blogger Becky Sutton of EWG's California office
The attire for Project Prom 2007, yesterday’s Teens for Safe Cosmetics rally, symbolized the commitment to fight for safe and healthy beauty products. Live music and passionate speeches from the teens and their supporters rang out over San Francisco’s Union Square, as rallygoers and passing pedestrians enjoyed free green makeovers on a rare warm and sunny day in the City.
Jessica Assaf, a leading member of Teens for Safe Cosmetics, summed up the rally: "This is about standing up to a billion-dollar industry and demanding change. We should not have to choose between beauty and our health." (Read more about the rally in today’s Oakland Tribune.)
The Teens for Safe Cosmetics are big fans of Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database, an online database of thousands of personal care products, each with a safety rating based on U.S. and international toxicological and regulatory databases. The teens keep pushing us to add more products to the database – we’re working on it! In fact, we’ll release an exciting update to Skin Deep very soon.
For our next project on cosmetics, we’ll move from looking at products to looking at people – specifically, teens. 20 teens, from all over California and the U.S., have volunteered to give us samples of their blood and urine. We’ll test these samples for a variety of chemicals found in many personal care products, chemicals linked to significant potential health concerns. Each of our teen participants will learn her very own chemical body burden, the pollution in her own body. I’m excited to see how all of these teens use this uniquely personal information to educate and to fight to make personal care products safe for all of us.
Speaking of proms, one environmentally friendly and economically friendly and socially friendly idea is for girls to donate their used prom dresses for a sale, as at the URL above. This recycles the dresses, provides funds for a charity, and allows girls with less income (or less interest in wasting it on a one-night dress) to have a beautiful gown. Some sororities or other girls' clubs sponsor these sales.
It is very generous for girls that donate their prom dresses or evening gowns to the charity and even hold charity programs to help raise funds for less fortunate children.