How to read labels:
You can’t know if a cosmetic is harmful or not by looking at its packaging, or advertisement. The only thing that you can trust is an ingredients label. 
Many people think that if a product is on the market, it must have already been tested, and is guaranteed to be safe. But the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) requirements for labeling of cosmetics are not as strict as requirements for other products regulated by the FDA. Products are not required to undergo testing before they are sold to the public. Therefore, the FDA must prove a product is harmful or mislabeled before it can take it off the market.

There are some requirements that cosmetics are obligated to follow. If a company has not tested its product’s safety under conditions of use, it must have on its label the following warning: “WARNING: The safety of this product has not been determined.”

Like almost all ingredients labels, cosmetics are required to list the ingredients used in the product in order of the quantity used in the product. In this example, “Water” comes first and therefore is used more than the other ingredients.

Some labels will have a section called “active ingredients”. This means that the product has some sort of property to “treat or prevent disease”, basically putting it under the category of being a drug and a cosmetic. If so, then the product must comply with drug and cosmetic labeling requirements and the company must have proof that the active ingredient is safe. The FDA stipulates that companies must list the active ingredient first in an ingredients label, then in order of quantity.
Many people will believe a product is safe if it says “natural” or “hypoallergenic”. But the FDA has no official definition for any of those terms and any cosmetics company can write them without it being true. Some examples of this include:

• “Natural” People assume that “natural” means the product will not harm you because it has no synthetic ingredients. It has not been proven that natural materials are “good” for you.
• “Sensitivity tested” and “dermatologist-tested” This means that a product is less likely to cause irritation. Companies are not required to back this claim.
• “Fragrance free” This means that there is no odor, not that there are no fragrance in a product. >>SEE LINK TO FRAGRANCE FOR MORE INFO<< Companies sometimes use masking fragrances to cover up odors. True “fragrance free” products will read “without perfume”.