A couple of weeks ago, I was baking a cake. It was one of those cakes where half of it is pink while the other half is blue. I was annoyed by the number of bowls and pans that was going to go into this cake, so I just mixed the pink and blue batter into one bowl and baked it. To my dismay, I ended up with a (of all things!) a puke-green cake. Now let’s say you are a cosmetics company that makes eye shadow. When you are done mixing the ingredients in the eye shadow, some to preserve the product, some to give it its consistency, some to give it a pleasant odor or to cover up unpleasant odors, you might not end up with that sparkly sky blue you wanted.
This is where color additives come in handy. A color additive is defined by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as “any dye, pigment or substance that can impart color when added or applied to a food, drug, cosmetic, or to the human body.”
If you’ve read many of the other articles on ingredients of cosmetics in this site, the “Regulations” article, or the “How to Read Labels” found in the Expand section, you’ll know that the FDA has limited power over cosmetics companies when it comes to regulations and testing requirements. But this is not true with color. Every color additive used in cosmetics, food and drugs must be approved by the government. The FDA’s Center for Food Safety & Applied Nutrition has a complete list of color additives with everything from their date of approval to what cosmetics they are commonly used it.
Now, when you read a color on an ingredients label, the abbreviation may be a bit confusing. In order to understand it, you may have to understand a bit about color additives first. For example, let us dissect the significance of “FD&C Yellow No.6 Sunset Yellow.” First of all, FD&C Yellow No.6 Sunset Yellow is actually orange, not yellow. But there’d be no way you could know that. The first part: “FD&C” means that it has been approved for use in food, drugs and cosmetics. Other such abbreviations include: drugs and cosmetics (D&C) and external drugs and cosmetics (External D&C). The next part is a color and a number, in this case “Yellow No.6 Sunset Yellow”. Cosmetics companies are now allowed to just list the number and color, like “Yellow 6”. Now you may be wondering why I haven’t spouted scary facts about how color additives are horrible for you and that you shouldn’t use make-up anymore. Well that’s because this is a case where something has already been done, a poster child of what the cosmetics industry should be. “In 1900, there were 80 man-made color additives available for use” in foods alone. Imagine the cosmetics industry. Now there are only 9 color additives available for use in foods, and more than 45 in cosmetics. Action was spurred when the government started to question the amount of color additives that people consumed through cosmetics, food, and drugs. A theory popped up in the 1970’s that color additives could cause learning disabilities in children. The theory was later proved wrong, but the damage was already done. Now, in order for a company to use a new color additive, they must send in a petition to the FDA, performing extensive safety tests on animals. (Therefore there are no “cruelty-free products”, unless the color additives are made from naturally occurring plants and animals.) The FDA also has an “Adverse Reaction Monitoring System” to investigate reports of adverse reactions to color additives. There have been some studies done recently to determine the accuracy of the theory that certain color additives, like tar, can cause cancer. But I still haven’t figured out why my cake turned green. Maybe if I added a little bit of Yellow 6…
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ThinkQuest 2006: Xiaoxiao, Lisa, Susan & Sri
