Most people use several different personal care products every day. For example, you may use a shampoo and conditioner, creams or lotions, shaving cream, fragrances, toothpaste and some makeup, including lipstick, eyeliner and eyeshadow.
If you read the labels on these products you’ll see a list of chemicals, and you may assume that these chemicals have been tested to make sure that they’re safe.
However, the Food and Drug Administration does not do any long-term testing on these chemicals. They may be tested to see whether they result in short-term problems, such as skin irritation, and the FDA may act, if they get complaints about harmful effects from a product.
Several nonprofit groups are finding or conducting the necessary studies and distributing that vital information to us consumers. One organization is the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and in this program, we feature Kaley Beins a senior scientist of chemical safety and toxicology at the EWG.
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Kaley Beins is a senior scientist at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG) where she synthesizes toxicologic data for consumer product databases, develops criteria for EWG’s ecolabel program, and serves as the technical lead for a grant on alternatives assessment. Prior to joining EWG in 2022, Ms. Beins was a Program Officer at the National Academy of Sciences where she worked on consensus studies and federally funded workshops. She also has experience as a government contractor working on toxicologic reports and green chemistry and product labeling initiatives for various agencies. Ms. Beins received her Master of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences from the University of Maryland and her Bachelor of Science in Environmental Biology from Georgetown University. She is an alumna of the Fulbright Fellowship Program, vice president of the D.C. Chapter of Sigma Xi, a member of SETAC’s Advancement and Application of Alternatives Assessment (A4) interest group, and a member of SOT since 2022.
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Since it began in 2015, Mothering Earth has been bringing listeners informative programs on a broad range of environmental and sustainable living topics .
