Have any of you heard the rumor—or perhaps conspiracy theory is more accurate—that Jackie O’s lymphoma was a consequence of her frequent hair dyeing? We don’t subscribe to such fear mongering, but it is true that dark hair dyes are notoriously toxic.
Siobhan—brave soul—experimented with natural blonde highlights in the book. But as the resident brunette I never tested out any of the clean dyes, or DIYs (like the coffee rinse) for darker hair. I’ll admit that it was a an oversight. See, I just haven’t colored my hair since my tween experiments with henna—and there were so many other things to try! But no more excuses. I know it’s a major concern for some of you, and it appears it may be for me too soon: The grays are creeping on me! Yep, they’re sprouting from the top of my head like little electrocuted worms.
So I’m calling on you ladies for counsel. Have any of you tried the darker natural dyes? The coffee? Has anything been a success or a failure? I plan to do some heavy googling about this, but your stories would be appreciated.
We are the excited authors of No More Dirty Looks: The Truth About Your Beauty Products, and the Ultimate Guide to Safe and Clean Cosmetics. That’s Siobhan O’Connor on the left, and Alexandra Spunt on the right. We’re best friends and we’re journalists—and we also share a way-too-long history of product obsession.
A few years back we went for the then-new (and very expensive) Brazilian blowout. Sold to us as a healthy keratin treatment for our hair, the Brazilian, we later discovered, was actually laced with formaldehyde. The eye-burning fumes probably should have tipped us off, but we’d be lying if we said we gave it a second thought at the time. We were just psyched about how great our hair was going to look. Anyway, you can read all about it in our book, but it was this experience (and the self-diagnosing Google panic that ensued) that made us wonder for the first time: What the hell is in our beauty products, anyways? And once we figured out that they were loaded with all kinds of sketchy chemicals, we wondered: Does anyone have our backs when it comes to safety? The answer to the latter is a big, fat no.
We wanted to write something for women much like us—that is, women who love products but who also care about the planet, and don’t want to sacrifice their health for their looks (or vice versa).
We’ll tell you now: Our year of experimenting with what we call “clean” beauty garnered better results than almost everything we’d tried before. And we’ve tried a lot.
In the book we look at the lack of regulation in the industry and try to make sense of some of the confusing science around long-term low-dose chemical exposure, because our bodies absorb up to 60% of what we put on them, and the cosmetics business uses over 10,000 chemicals in their products—many of them with woefully inadequate safety data written about them.
Over the last two years, we trolled countless scientific journals and databases, we spoke to experts, and we asked questions—over and over again—until somebody would answer us. But the book is not all serious! It’s also an exhaustive guide to the most effective clean products on the market, tested by us. (And in the few cases where we didn’t fit the guinea-pig bill, for aesthetic or racial reasons, we turned to trusted friends.)
This site will be done in the same spirit. We plan to post frequently about everything from the latest research, to the latest blushes. There will be beauty tips, and new clean-product finds. There will also be rants about things that piss us off, like the fact that there was lead in every lipstick the FDA tested not too long ago.
We’re excited to hear from you—whether you’re already a converted clean girl, or whether you think we’re full of crap. It’s the discussion that counts, so we hope you’ll take part.
