Crash Course on Parabens!

You may have seen the name while reading the back of your shampoo bottle in the shower, or your toothpaste tube while brushing your teeth, and this is not surprising, considering the fact that parabens are in a majority of common household items.
Parabens are used to prevent the growth of microbes in cosmetic products, and can be absorbed through the skin, blood, and digestive system. Parabens actually are several distinct chemicals with a similar molecular structure. The general chemical structure of a paraben, or a para-hydroxybenzoate, is:

 where the R is an alkyl group.

The most common forms are ethylparaben, butylparaben, methylparaben, and propylparaben. where the R group is an ethyl, butyl, methyl, and propyl respecitvely.

These compounds are found in well over 10,000 of the 25,000 products in the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep database. Clearly, we have a lot of exposure to them in our day-to-day activities.
However, a 2004 UK study detected traces of parabens in the breast cancer tumors of 19 out of 20 women studied. This small study does not prove an actual relationship between parabens and cancer, but it did detect the presence of intact parabens that were unaffected by the body's metabolism. This is especially important because it shows that these compounds have the ability to penetrate the skin and remain within the body.
But once the parabens enter into the body, what makes them so dangerous?
Of greatest concern is that parabens are known to disrupt normal estrogen function, which can lead to breast cancer. They mimic estrogen and bind to the estrogen receptors on cells. They also increase the expression of genes usually regulated by estrogen, and these genes are what cause human breast tumor cells to grown and multiply in cellular studies.

Clearly, parabens are potentially dangerous compounds that are in a myriad of common cosmetic products. While there are concentration limits recommended for parabens in commercial products, these recommendations do not account for the use of multiple parabens in a single product or for exposure to parabens from several products by a single individual. Cosmetic manufacturers are seeking alternative methods to prevent microbial growth in their products, but for now, the cheapest and most effective method is parabens.What we can only do is make sure we are aware of the potentially harmful compounds in our products, and their effects. 
           A variety of cosmetics without parabens



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