When I was younger, my favorite shampoo was L’Oreal’s Strawberry Smoothie Shampoo. It smelled so good, so much like real strawberries that I would just sit and sniff that glorious shampoo. But as music artist Isaac Hayes once said, “If you enjoy the fragrance of a rose, you must accept the thorns it bears.” And in the case of our cosmetics, cruel thorns accompany the sweet roses that scent our perfumes, colognes, shampoos, deodorants, air fresheners and soaps.

Fragrance is widely used in such products, and because the ingredients in it are considered trade secrets, the word “fragrance” on an ingredients label could mean over four thousand chemicals, many toxic and carcinogenic.

Fragrance. Such an innocent word, standing alone in a sea of long science-y words on an ingredients label. How dangerous can it be? Dangerous enough to cause “headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, drop in blood pressure, CNS depression, death in severe cases due to respiratory failure, reduced spontaneous motor activity, depression, and fatal edema." Fragrance is “the primary cause of allergic skin reactions to cosmetics”, according to the US Food and Drug Administration. In a 1991 study conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), of the 20 most common fragrance chemicals used in common cosmetic products, three were narcotic, three were carcinogenic, three were listed as hazardous waste by the EPA, and five were known to cause several disorders of the central nervous system, including “multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, and Alzheimer's disease.” So now that you have a newfound awareness of what your everyday cosmetics can do to you, you may think to perhaps avoid fragrance-containing products. But beware the misleading labels on products marking them as “unscented”. Unscented products may have something called a “masking fragrance” that covers the scent of other ingredients, which companies are not required to list on an ingredients label. The true fragrance-free products will read “without perfume” rather that “unscented”.

Needless to say, my Strawberry Smoothie Shampoo and I don’t get along like we used to.

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ThinkQuest 2006: Xiaoxiao, Lisa, Susan & Sri