While Kourtney Kardashian may have famously said she doesn’t read the news on her family’s long-running reality show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, she made some today in Washington, D.C., where she appeared with members of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) at a Capitol Hill briefing on cosmetics reform.
The issue of cosmetics safety reform is one that has become more and more prominent in recent years, in no small part thanks to the EWG’s work to raise awareness about chemicals found in personal care products and their work to empower the FDA to regulate them more freely. “It’s been more than 80 years since Congress last acted to pass any sort of cosmetics legislation,” Scott Faber, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at EWG, said at the beginning of the briefing. “And that’s why it’s so important that Kourtney is here today to lend her voice.”
It’s also why the group supports the Personal Care Products Safety Act, a bipartisan bill introduced by Senators Dianne Feinstein (D—Calif.) and Susan Collins (R—Maine) that, among other things, would require companies to disclose their ingredients to the FDA, register the facilities where their products are made, and permit the FDA to insist on warning labels where necessary.
“Under current law, cosmetics companies can put just about anything in cosmetics and personal care products. There are few if any restrictions on the kinds of ingredients that can be added to personal care products or the amount of those chemicals,” Faber explained. “What the Feinstein-Collins bill will do, is it will give FDA the power to review the most controversial ingredients or chemicals in personal care products, and ultimately make a determination if those ingredients are safe or safe at certain levels or not safe.” The bill has the support of a number of beauty companies both large and small—from Procter & Gamble, Revlon, Estée Lauder, and L’Oréal to Juice Beauty, EO, and Vapour Beauty.
Any fan of KUWTK knows that Kourtney is the member of her family that is perhaps the most conscientious about what she puts into (and onto) both her own body and those of her three children, so her interest in this issue isn’t completely surprising. She says it was the birth of her first child, Mason, that caused her to start thinking differently about products. “I would get so many baby gifts,” she explained. “And a lot of it was skin care products for my kids. I would use the things that people sent me just assuming these are baby products and that they should be safe.” (In fact, there is no reason to assume that just because a beauty product is geared toward children that it is more regulated, as our recent Glamour investigation showed.) “Some of them had a lot of toxic chemicals so I just started researching myself,” Kardashian continued. “And I found EWG and have the Healthy Living app and I just started getting my own information.” (The app provides environmental ratings for over 200,000 foods and products.) She says that she tries to do the work herself, but as a busy working mom she doesn’t always have the bandwidth and thinks it’s time for Congress to do its job: “As parents, there’s only so much time that we have to research, and we rely on experts, but I think there’s only so much that we can do.”
Of course, reporters had a few questions for the eldest Kardashian offspring about her family’s own ties to the beauty business. “I am from a beauty family. And so, my sisters’ products have been checked by EWG and they scored well,” Kardashian said. But she couldn’t speak to the specific ingredients in Kylie Cosmetics or KKW Beauty. “Those are their companies,” she said. “But I think it would be nice if there were laws to regulate cosmetics so that the people running these businesses and these companies can have some standard of what to use.” She told an anecdote about one of her hairstylists, an expert, who wasn’t even aware of some the chemicals in what they had both considered some of the best products available. “I get hair and makeup almost every day for filming and for my job,” she continued. “And I think…I go in blindly. I have all sorts of makeup artists and they want to use the best products and even they don’t have the information.”
And of course, there was a quick plug for her new collaboration with her sister Kylie Jenner—three eye shadow palettes and three lip colors—which launches today. “It’s a Kourt x Kylie collab. It launches today at 3 P.M. Pacific time,” Kardashian said. “Kylie and I were working on it for over a year. We kept changing our minds about colors and going back and forth and it was really fun to work with her and be creative together…We had a party together at Coachella. It was my first time there, at almost 39-years-old. But it was really fun and we’re really excited that it comes out today.”
As for the Personal Care Products Safety Act, its advocates hope Kardashian’s involvement today will make it known to a wider audience who are ready to make their voices heard on the issue. The bill is currently with the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (the HELP Committee).
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