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Eye makeup excused from mercury ban

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Mercury, eye makeup, international treatyBut even mascara brands without mercury sometimes use other harmful preservatives.

Mercury was banned in cosmetics and soaps by a global treaty signed recently at the United Nations Environment Programme’s’ Minamata Convention for Mercury – but mascara and other eye makeup were exempted.

Mercury is used in trace amounts in eye makeup as a preservative.

The treaty exempts eye area cosmetics because “no effective, safe substitute alternatives are available.”

The Minamata Convention aims to protect human health and the environment from the adverse effects of mercury and is designed to limit mercury use and emissions internationally by reducing emissions and releases of the toxic metal into air, land and water and phasing out many products that contain mercury.

The treaty was agreed to on 10 October after four years of negotiations. It is the first new global convention on environment and health for close to a decade.

Many local people were poisoned in the mid-20th century after eating mercury-contaminated seafood from Minamata Bay in Japan. As a consequence, the neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning has come to be known as Minamata Disease.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) said the intention of the ban was to eliminate cosmetics like skin-lightening cream and others that contain large concentrations of mercury and have been shown to cause kidney damage in women.

The Times of India, reporting from a country where skin lightener use is widespread said the global health watchdog World Health Organisation (WHO) said the serious adverse effects of inorganic mercury, a common ingredient in skin lightening soaps and creams, include kidney damage, reduction in the skin’s resistance to bacterial and fungal infections, anxiety, depression or psychosis and peripheral neuropathy or damage to one or more of your peripheral nerves.

The WHO, the newspaper continued, pointed out that mercury in soaps and creams is eventually discharged into wastewater.

The mercury then enters the environment, where it becomes methylated, and enters the food chain as highly toxic methylmercury in fish.

Pregnant women who consume fish containing methylmercury transfer the mercury to their foetuses and that can later result in neurological deficits in children.

Defending UNEP’s stance, Joanna Tempowski, a scientist on the WHO’s International Program on Chemical Safety told Environmental Health News that mercury is added to prevent the growth of bacteria and fungi that could infect and damage the eye, noting that “the risk-benefit analysis favours the use of these preservatives.”

Mascara brands without mercury sometimes use other harmful preservatives, such as formaldehyde, which is a carcinogenic, or  parabens, which may be linked to hormone disruption, according to Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep Database.

Here is a list compiled by One Green Planet to help you find some chemical and cruelty-free mascaras.

  1. Petra Wolf says:

    Perhaps we should show a sense of agency and not use mascara in the first place? It is all very well criticizing the beauty industry but nobody forces you to use that rubbish. If you know what is in it and continue to use it, then sorry, everyone is responsible for their own action.

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