The umbilical cord blood of ten American newborns tested by the Environmental Working Group and Commonweal in the summer of 2004 contained 287 industrial chemicals. Of those, 180 cause cancer in humans or animals, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 cause birth defects or developmental damage in animal studies. The babies had never left the womb. What the mothers carried, the babies carried. And what the mothers carried by 2004 included substances that had not existed when their own grandmothers were born. Stacy Malkan’s Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, published in 2007, follows the chemical trail back to its source in the shampoos, deodorants, lotions, and cosmetics applied to the mother’s body every morning of the pregnancy.
Malkan wrote from inside the story. For six years she was communications director of Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition organized to reduce the health care industry’s environmental impact, and she worked alongside the founding organizers of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics from the earliest days of the effort. She sat at the conference table with Charlotte Brody late at night as the 2002 Not Too Pretty investigation was pulled together against deadline, sorting the sticky notes that tracked every task on the campaign’s schedule. She paid $595 on her mother’s credit card in 2006 to attend Health and Beauty America, the cosmetics industry’s largest annual conference, undercover. From the trade association’s regulatory summit she took notes on what the industry told itself in private. The book is a first-person account by a participant with direct access to the meetings, the internal correspondence between advocacy groups and multinational corporations, and the industry rooms where the strategy against those groups was being set.
The book appeared at a specific moment. In November 2000 the Centers for Disease Control published the first national biomonitoring report showing that every American tested carried scores of industrial chemicals in blood and urine, including seven different phthalates in the same 289-person sample. Three years later the Environmental Working Group and Mount Sinai School of Medicine published the first chemical body burden study conducted on members of the general population, and in 2004 the cord blood investigation established that the burden had reached the newborn. The European Union moved across the same window. The Seventh Amendment to the Cosmetics Directive, approved in 2003, banned 1,100 chemicals from cosmetics sold across the member states, including two phthalates that the American cosmetics industry was still defending as safe. When Malkan sat down to write, the United States had become the outlier. The evidence had accumulated for a decade. The regulatory response had not.
Not Just a Pretty Face documents toxic exposure as a driver of disease, which the terrain framework identifies as the first of four categories of insult producing what medicine calls chronic illness. Malkan writes from within establishment vocabulary, and terms like “hormone-disrupting” and “endocrine disruptor” are attributed framing in the publication’s own voice. Her findings converge on terrain conclusions from establishment premises, and the evidence she assembles is the establishment’s own record. The full summary traces the Shanna Swan 2005 study connecting prenatal phthalate exposure to measurable changes in male infant genital development, the reformulation double standard through which multinational corporations sell phthalate-free products in Europe and Korea while defending the toxic versions to American women, and the pipeline through which AstraZeneca founded National Breast Cancer Awareness Month while its parent company was named in a federal lawsuit for dumping DDT and PCBs into California harbors. Lead was found in every one of the five lipsticks tested by Pittsburgh’s WPXI-TV in July 2006, at levels above the FDA limit for candy, in a product the labels advise women to reapply frequently.
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