by Joanna

Adding a touch of lipstick to your outfit will add some colour to your face and can even accentuate your smile. However, that glamour comes with a price.

The average woman will ingest about 6 lbs of lipstick in her lifetime. That's a whole lot of unnatural ingredients to process in your body! To help you understand a bit more in what lipstick is made out of, here are some of the harmful ingredients you will come across in the product.

Toxic Ingredients

Lipstick is usually made up of wax, oil, pigments, dyes, alcohol, preservatives and antioxidants. And those are the more benign ingredients! The harmful ingredients you should look out for includes:

- Lead: This is the most common ingredient used in lipstick and can cause infertility, anemia, cancer, learning disabilities, mental retardation and behavioral problems.
- Coal Tar Derived FD&C Coloring: Red lipstick comes from pigments like Red no. 40 are made from coal tar. When ingested, it can cause nausea, attention deficit, headaches, skin irritation.
- Carmine: Is a coloring agent that causes skin irritations and allergies.
- Lake Colors: These artificial colouring agents are highly toxic. They come from carcinogenic sources and can cause cancer, skin irritation and allergies.
- Fragrance: It can cause dry, chapped lips and dermatitis.
- D4 and D5 siloxanes: Are toxic chemicals that exhibit in lipstick as well other daily items such as hair products, body lotions and home cleaning products. These chemicals are linked to damages to the female reproductive system in animals as well as developing uterine tumours. Not only are they toxic to humans, since it can travel in concentrated amounts of great distances by air, wildlife is also at risk to the pollutants. They can easily go back into the food chain and pose even more long term health risks to people.

This list shouldn't scare you into thinking you can never wear lipstick again. It just means we need to be more mindful when choosing cosmetic product. The lipstick jungle is full of chemicals! To make things easy, run products and brands through the Environmental Working Group's cosmetic database to learn their true ingredients before buying.

You can also check out our sister site, Feel Good Style, for lots of tips on natural makeup and DIY alternatives to store brand products!