Free Republic

Toxic Makeup Draws Congressional AttentionLawmakers Debating Whether FDA Should Step Up Regulation of Makeup By JOYCE FRIEDEN July 22, 2010 Congress and the cosmetics industry are both calling for tighter regulation of the chemicals used in cosmetics and other personal care products due to concerns over possible carcinogens and other toxic ingredients. In Congress, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) introduced a bill on Tuesday calling for cosmetics makers to register with the federal government and for larger cosmetics firms to pay user fees to enforce the regulation. The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 also would require all ingredients in a cosmetic...

For Rebekah Testar, selling Avon products door-to-door started as a part-time hobby to earn a little extra cash for Christmas. However, the mother-of-three is now one of the company's top sales consultants - having sold more than £4million of beauty products. The mother-of-three agreed to work after her husband, Tony, was forced to give up his job as a financial consultant because of ill health.

Why Cosmetics Rule the 1st Floor of Department Stores Invariably, in Korea as much as the rest of the world, cosmetics shops dominate the ground floor of department stores. The reason is simple: customers who purchased cosmetics items on the first floor account for more than 70 percent of retailers' total sales. Hyundai Department Store analyzed the sales contribution of customers who paid with department store credit cards during the first 11 months of last year, to find out how much the annual spending of customers who bought specific items contributed to total sales. It showed that cosmetics purchasers make...

Amazing...and frightening.

Police in Peru Say Gang Members Killed People To Drain Their Fat For Cosmetics November 19, 2009 Gang members in Peru face charges of killing people and draining their fat for use in cosmetics, police said today. Police showed journalists two bottles of fat that authorities said were recovered from two suspects and a photograph of a rotting head believed to be of a male victim. The suspects allegedly told police the fat was worth $60,000 per gallon. Police Col. Jorge Mejia said three suspects who confessed to five killings told authorities the fat was sold in Lima, the capital....

Peru accuses four of murder, selling human fat 07:26 AEST Fri Nov 20 2009 ago Four people have been arrested in Peru on suspicion of killing some 60 people to sell their fat and other human tissue to Italian co-conspirators for cosmetic use in Europe. The suspects were arrested in central Peru this month and a search is underway for seven others — including two Italian citizens whose names were not revealed — lead prosecutor Jorge Sans Quiroz told AFP. The fat was purchased "to be commercialized in European (cosmetology) laboratories," he said. The prosecutor's indictment said the gang allegedly...

European Union continues phasing out animal experiments.The European Union has outlawed the use of animals in seven toxicity tests for cosmetics ingredients.Alamy An amendment to the European Union's Cosmetics Directive today phases out the use of animals in testing for any acute toxic effects of beauty products and toiletries — effects such as eye and skin irritation that might be seen shortly after exposure. Nature News finds out what this entails.What is the Cosmetics Directive and how is it changing? The Cosmetics Directive was introduced in 1976 to enforce high safety standards for cosmetics across the EU member states. It...

Cleopatra's Cosmetics And Hammurabi's Heineken: Name Brands Far Predating Modern CapitalismEgyptian perfume bottle. Could product branding have begun in ancient Egypt? (Credit: iStockphoto) ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2008) — From at least Bass Ale's red triangle--advertised as "the first registered trademark"--commodity brands have exerted a powerful hold over modern Western society. Marketers and critics alike have assumed that branding began in the West with the Industrial Revolution. But a pioneering new study in the February 2008 issue of Current Anthropology finds that attachment to brands far predates modern capitalism, and indeed modern Western society. In "Prehistories of Commodity Branding," author David...

The lip balm shows Christ flanked by two women (Photo: Blue Q) A leading retailer in Singapore has withdrawn a cosmetics range with a Jesus theme after complaints from local Roman Catholics, local media report. The range, named Lookin' Good for Jesus, was on sale at three Topshop outlets in the Asian city state. Catholics complained the cosmetics' marketing was disrespectful, full of sexual innuendo and trivialised Christianity. About 15% of Singapore's 4.4 million population is Christian. The products included a "Virtuous vanilla" lip balm and a "Get Tight with Christ" hand and body cream, featuring a picture of...

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) - Presidential hopeful John Edwards inadvertently made the late night comedy shows this year when his campaign spending reports included two $400 haircuts. Now Mrs. Edwards has joined other candidates helping a Concord hair stylist who wants to turn the controversy into help for a good cause. David Holden owns Hair Biz on Main Street, a couple of doors away from an Edwards campaign office. After the Democratic former senator's haircut made news last spring, Holden challenged presidential hopefuls to come in for $400 haircuts of their own, promising to donate all of the proceeds to autism...

WASHINGTON – In the wake of scandals involving tainted food and toothpaste from China comes word of a new concern from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission as well as the Food and Drug Administration – toys, makeup, glazed pottery and other products that contain significant amounts of lead. While lead poisoning among children was once mainly caused by old paint, U.S. manufacturers long ago banned the ingredient. Today, a new rash of high lead levels in the bloodstreams of American kids is being caused by foreign products – mainly from China. So serious is the resurgence of lead poisoning...

It used to be so easy to get elected president. All one needed was a good slogan, a whistle-stop tour, a few posters, political buttons, a favorably disposed smoke-filled room, campaign promises, a booming voice and an invisible madam. Those were the good old days.

An upmarket London beauty salon's claims that bull semen can give hair the ultimate shine is likely to go untried in the Waikato. Hari's, in hoity toity Chelsea, offers a 45-minute Aberdeen Organic Hair treatment involving massaging a protein-rich mixture of bull semen and a plant root into the client's hair. But Julie May, who owns The Salon, in Garden Place, Hamilton, is not keen to try it in her establishment. "I would not want it on my hair. I know what the reaction from customers would be here and I know what my staff would say," she said. "It's...

France's own Dr. Roger Amar, pioneer of the F.A.M.I (Facial Autografting Muscle Injection), will be visiting the United States from January 2 to January 7, 2007 to teach American surgeons and make this innovative procedure available to interested, eligible candidates. Dr. Amar's U.S. base will be New York City, NY and Philadelphia, PA. F.A.M.I is a systematized full-face injection for pan-facial restoration and has been performed successfully on over 500 patients. The procedure can give a genuine restoration and/or rejuvenation without the presence of foreign bodies. Instead of tightening and shortening by incision of unsupported skin, F.A.M.I injects the face...

Transcription from radio/internet broadcast: Pro-life advocates are decrying a grisly new outrage in Europe: Face lifts and cosmetic surgery using tissue from aborted babies are being offered at clinics in places such as Moscow and Rotterdam, and women from around the globe are flocking. In many cases women in third world nations are being paid up to $200.00 US to carry babies up to 12 weeks of pregnancy, when the unborn children are aborted and sold to the cosmetic clinics. An increasing number of these facilities are now springing up in popular vacation spots including Barbados and the Dominican Republic...

Babies -- Bought, Sold and Traded LONDON, SEPT. 17, 2005 (Zenit.org) Abortion advocates' decades-long push to deny or downplay the humanity of the unborn child is bearing fruit. Unborn children are increasingly being treated like consumer products, if recent news stories are an indication. Last Saturday the London-based Times published a story describing how the Institute for Problems of Cryobiology and Cryomedicine of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, in Kharkov, sells baby parts. The list on its Web site offers a variety of cells and other tissues from babies. The institute alleges that the material comes from fetuses...

DUBLIN, Ireland, March 29, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Two Ukraininan doctors, Vadym Lazaryev and Vladymyr Ishchenko, have been seeking asylum in Ireland since 2004, after they were forced to flee their country for exposing appalling human rights abuses of women and unborn children in the Ukraine. The doctors were part of a group working to uncover a macabre system of medical trafficking in the bodies of unborn babies, European Life Network reported today. Doctors were deceiving women into aborting their babies for false "medical" reasons, and then selling the bodies of the children. The children would be aborted live, and...

A Chinese cosmetics company has been using skin taken from the bodies of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, a London newspaper reported. An agent for the company informed customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they had been shot. The agent said some of the company‘s products have been exported to Britain, and that the use of skin from condemned convicts was “traditional" and nothing to “make such a big fuss about,“ the Guardian reported In addition to ethical concerns, there is the potential risk of...

LONDON (Reuters) - North Wales police couldn't believe their eyes when a camera at a notorious accident spot caught a driver using both hands to put on her make-up. Donna Maddock, 22, was filmed as she drove along the A499, one of Britain's most dangerous roads. She held a mirror in her left hand and an eye pencil in her right, leaving the steering wheel to itself. Wednesday, she was fined 200 pounds ($350) with 55 pounds costs and had six penalty points added to her driving license after admitting careless driving at Pwllheli magistrates court. "A car is a...

China Gears Up to Avenge Korean Food Safety Warnings After revelations that freshwater fish imported from China was tainted with the carcinogenic dye malachite green and Chinese-produced kimchi contained parasites and unusually high levels of lead, Beijing appears to be getting ready to avenge its tainted honor. "Inspections have shown that Korean products contain malachite green as well, but the Korean government without notifying the Chinese government, and without a seeking consensus on the issue, simply made an announcement in the press as if Chinese products were the only products with such problems," a Chinese government official said. "If there...