Felicity Tepper

BCAM has its own blog! It is called Conscious Cosmetics and it is aimed at raising awareness in an interactive way about the environment and health links with our use of cosmetics. It is hoped that we can help everyone in BCAM and beyond (family, friends, colleagues) to share information about the health consequences of numerous potentially and known harmful chemical ingredients that are in our cosmetics.

Some people have asked us why we used the term “cosmetics”. This term is actually far wider than just makeup and includes a wide array of personal care products. It is important to understand the term “cosmetics” because it is used in the Canadian legislation that regulates the products. As well as makeup, the term cosmetics covers items such as deodorant, sunscreen, hair products, baby products, perfumes, toothpaste, hair removal products, hair dyes, shaving creams, soaps, teeth whiteners, etc. In addition, although drugs are not cosmetics, we cast our net to cover some of these as well because they sit in a grey area and often contain ingredients of concern, such as parabens in cough medicine. You may think that your dandruff shampoo is a cosmetic but it’s considered a drug and is therefore regulated differently. In fact, knowing this makes such products even scarier and should lead us to question their safety and to demand more information.

The blog is intended as a space to share information, to raise awareness and to help educate. Its direction is flexible, and its content is reasonably broad, as long as it pertains to the environmentally-induced concerns for our health, in particular breast cancer; principally, it focuses on cosmetics. We are hoping for it to act as both a database of information and as a living, evolving cyber-meeting place where you can add your input and learn more about the many layers to our choices of cosmetics.

We’d love it if you could spare a moment to visit our blog and read the parts that interest you. (Although the bulk of the blog is in English, comments in either language—French or English—are invited. Also, we invite your suggestions about articles in French for addition to the blog.)

You’ll find information about the Safe Cosmetics Committee’s activities, BCAM activities and a wealth of resources on products, chemicals, ingredients, news and information. There are referrals to websites we consider to be helpful in your journey to uncover the truth about what we are using for our personal care. And most importantly, you can leave us comments in the comment boxes under each blog article or, if you’d prefer, you can e-mail us at conscious.cosmetics@gmail.com. Let us know what you think and give us your tips and information as well!

Find out more at BCAM's Blog: Conscious Cosmetics at www.conscious-personal-care.blogspot.com