The Tip of the Iceberg

It started as a slow trickle, really. All it took was for someone to mention the word “parabens” and I started to think.

I was at a Norwex party, and the saleswoman was talking about how there are chemicals that are unhealthy for us in our cleaning products or even our cosmetics. I was taken aback, but I didn't think much more about it.

About a year later, another lady was in my home trying to sell me something. This time it was Arbonne products. She talked more about parabens and what they actually could do to your body. I was a little more shocked, and reasoned that they had to be safe because they were in products like baby lotion.

It was after that night, I think my wariness about products we consume started. I did some research about parabens. Most of the articles I came across were anecdotal and not very helpful, but not a single one said anything good about them. I read what Wikipedia had to say, and again, nothing extremely bad, but nothing at all good.

The main thing about parabens, is that they act as xenoestrogens and that some estrogens drive the growing force behind tumours. Propylparaben, butylparaben, ethylparaben, isobutylparaben, as well as others have shown strong evidence that they disrupt the endocrine system as well as have a high human skin toxicant rating – this is according to the environmental working group's skin deep data base, which takes studies from around the word into consideration as they mark products from a 0-10 safety rating.

After researching more, my husband and I decided that we would try to avoid parabens as much as possible. As we were using up shampoos or soaps that we had previously bought, we replaced them with paraben free versions.

It has been over a year since then, and we are now realizing that parabens were just the tip of our toxic burden iceberg.