Kid Hugger: Detoxify bathtime

Mar.01.2009
12:47 am
by scribblekat

“Detoxify bathtime by learning which ingredients to avoid”

Cozy Friedman opened her first of three children’s hair salons, Cozy’s Cuts For Kids (cozyscuts.com), in 1994 with the idea of taking something potentially unfriendly or scary for children and making it fun. She provides colorful car-shaped styling chairs, entertaining videos, toys, balloons and bubbles. She also developed her So Cozy line of hair care products with kid-friendly fruity fragrances.

It wasn’t until her two boys, Shane and Riley (now 9 and 7), were old enough to need regular haircuts that she began wondering about the environmental movement and the advantages of using greener products for her children and herself. First, she noticed a lack of FDA control over terms like “natural.” Then she noticed a lot of what seemed to be deceptive advertising.

“Any product can say ‘natural’ on the label. But as a consumer and a mother, I see methyl paraben [a preservative and fungicide that is an endocrine disruptor] on the list of ingredients and I know that’s not natural,” Friedman says. Also, phthalates (chemicals made from petroleum and commonly used in plastics and cosmetics) are a concern in baby shampoo, and they’re not required to be listed on labels.

Clean up with green goods

To ensure the safety of her own line of products, Friedman revised her formulas to make them not only friendly to kids, but friendly to the environment. She replaced the parabens with a naturally occurring amino acid that inhibits the growth of bacteria, yeast and mold.

Friedman also added 11 herbal extracts (including comfrey, horsetail, aloe vera and tea tree oil), wrapped the products in 100 percent recyclable packaging and began using environmentally responsible manufacturing practices. They still have fruity fragrances, but the scents come from a gentler combination of ingredients that are less toxic than many chemicals that can be listed under the generic term “fragrance.”

What you can do

Lean toward natural Go to cosmetics database.com for a searchable database of 25,000 products cross-referenced against 50 toxicity databases.

Read the ingredients list Before buying personal care products for you and your baby, read labels carefully. Avoid methyl paraben and phthalates. They may not be listed, so check on the Internet.

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