Campaign For Safe Cosmetics: Carcinogens Found in Baby Products

Some of the biggest names on the market, including Johnson and Johnson Baby Shampoo and Baby Magic lotion, tested positive for 1, 4-dioxane or formaldehyde, or both, the nonprofit Campaign for Safe Cosmetics reported.

Some of the biggest names on the market, including Johnson and Johnson Baby Shampoo and Baby Magic lotion, tested positive for 1, 4-dioxane or formaldehyde, or both, the nonprofit Campaign for Safe Cosmetics reported.

Hyattsville, Md.: So what should I do when choosing products for my son? I'd love to know that you are pretty safe if you stay away from one brand, or consistently use another, but the risks seem to vary so much even between different variations on the same product by the same company. And sometimes the cheapee store brand is better than the expensive organic one, sometimes not. Any general guidelines short of starting to carry notes about what is safe and what isn't?

Stacy Malkan: A great resource for finding safer products is the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep database. This free database has toxicity information about 30,000 products, and you can search for all the baby products in the database to find the safest brands. In general, the best advice for choosing products is that simpler is better -- choose products with fewer chemicals, no synthetic fragrance, and use fewer products overall (especially on babies.) The risks do vary quite a lot within companies. This is an important point. It is also true that many of the big companies have a "green" brand that has fewer problematic chemicals. My question to the companies is: if you've already figured out how to make less-toxic products, why not do that for all your brands and products? It is going to take a change in federal legislation to get companies to consistently make the safest products.