List is Just a Four-Letter Word

My big beef with the ingredient lists SCA would require FDA to make is that they’re not risk-based. The law requires the FDA to make a “white list” (ingredients totally safe in any dose), a “gray list” (ingredients only safe in certain doses, which doses to be determined by the FDA) and a “black list” (ingredients not safe in any dose). It sounds great until you realize that even something as harmless as water is unsafe in high doses, and teeny tiny amounts of carcinogens are in everything. That’s when you come to realize that the “white list” will pretty much only have fairy dust and powdered unicorn horn on it, which means that the FDA will not be approving ANY ingredient until it has safety data. And the law doesn’t require the FDA to acquire such data except by gathering it from cosmetics producers. If, after paying people to administer all these lists of lists they have no money left over for research, they can force a bureaucratic nightmare on anyone attempting to use an ingredient they haven’t yet approved. And I consider this a likely scenario considering what happened with CPSIA. The funds were appropriated for CPSC to handle all the extra burden of CPSIA enforcement and rule-making, but they didn’t actually get the funds until well after the first year, and by then they would have had to make all the rules and start enforcing them.

Unicorn horn, indeed. Sarah, I always appreciate your point of view, and your experience with CPSIA has really helped all of us to see what awaits us if this should pass. I cannot imagine a world in which the government could get enough funding to administer AND research all of these ingredients. (If the FDA can’t get enough funding to maintain food and drug safety, how will cosmetics EVER be a priority?? And if we start with ppb ingredient testing on beauty products, how long will it be before we think we need to do so with food— especially since we’re all eating many of these black listed ingredients on a daily basis? Where will THAT money come from?) I can, however, envision a world in which huge companies pay for their own research and get approval for their own ingredients and formulas. Are these big companies likely to want to “share” the results of their testing free and clear with all the little companies who can’t afford it? Not bloody likely, in my opinion. Which may be the whole point, I suppose.

Emily, I am in total agreement with most of what you say in this and other discussions, but you (any many other commentators) seem to think that the “big corporations” have their own ingredients. They don’t (or only in extremely rare cases)! They buy from the same manufacturers/distributors that the “little guys” can buy from. I work for a distributor of cosmetic ingredients, and we supply everyone from the mighty to the tiny. It is usually the ingredient manufacturers that generate the toxicity information (if any) on their ingredients, and only very rarely does the cosmetic company do this. This information is usually available to customers – ie the cosmetics manufacturers. The majority of toxicity information not generated by the primary manufacturers is generated by research institutions – mostly universities. So anyone expecting a sudden flood of new toxicological information to become available is likely to be very disappointed.
Where the larger companies have the advantage is that they will be able to better afford the cost of an expert to assess the safety of the final product (not each ingredient in isolation).

Dene, in rereading my comment I realize that I wasn’t as clear as I should have been (not even in my own mind, which poses a bit of a problem, doesn’t it?!). I certainly understand that we are all using the same ingredients, all of which will, under this new law, will require “sorting” into the three categories they’ve outlined—the “priority assessment list, the safe without limits list, or the prohibited and restricted list.” If the law doesn’t require the FDA itself to test these ingredients, as Sarah says, presumably the responsibility falls on the ingredient manufacturers/suppliers and the cosmetics companies themselves to prove to the FDA that these ingredients are “safe” and provide data that will allow the FDA to properly “sort” them. If a company wants to use a particular ingredient before its toxicity has been assessed by the usual parties (ingredient manufacturers or, as you say, universities), the only option is for them to wait for such research, or to pay for it themselves (IS this an option?), something that only the larger companies would be able to afford.

What I meant when I said “their own ingredients” was that IF one of these companies pays for its own research to prove that a particular ingredient is “safe without limits” or safe within certain restrictions, they have to provide this information to the FDA. But after they’ve done this, it isn’t clear to me that all of this information will then be available to everyone else to use these ingredients. The bill says that the information will be made available in a “publicly accessible database containing all non-confidential information”–and I guess my question is, what is considered confidential? Will companies still be able to use ingredients that others don’t because they can afford the safety testing that others can’t? Will they still be able to claim that some aspect of this is “confidential”?

I may be misinterpreting this bill, or completely wrong about the way Things Are Done, and I welcome clarification! It seems like a complicated piece of legislation that would be almost impossible to comply with (not to mention enforce!). Certainly smaller companies would not have the funding to assess final product safety to whatever specifications the FDA determines. At least in this area, as you say, the larger companies have the advantage.

This really makes you wonder who really is behind this and what are they getting out of all of the propaganda!