How many cosmetics do you use to clean, monitor and perfume your skin, hair, and body parts? The least you use will use shower soap, shampoo and toothpaste, and many will also use moisturizing cream, deodorant and colony (even occasionally). The bait will often rub the foam and softener before making the bait. Jennifer E has found 921 breast cancer-related ingredients in the products we use for basic hygiene and maintenance. Research works led by Kay and conducted in the United States, published in January 2024 in the scientific journal Environmental Healt Perspectives. These substances include parabens and phthalates, which are endocrine disruptors that affect the hormonal system.

From there, the more products we use, such as the lips, the creams for the eyes, the products to shape and hold hair, the makeup... we add and mix the toxic components, producing cocktail effects. Nicolas Olea perfectly explains what the cocktail effect is. She, a researcher and professor at the University of Granada in Radiology and Physical Medicine, is a global reference in the study of the relationships between endocrine disruptors and cancers. In an interview with Ekologistak Martxan, Olea explained the following: "Endocrine disruptors are chemical pollutants that alter hormones. Some of these chemical contaminants cause an estrogen hormone that is related to breast cancer. However, we have had difficulties in associating exposure to these chemical pollutants with cancer, as the ordinary citizen receives this exposure in small doses and, looking at each of them individually, it seems that it does not have enough presence to have toxic consequences. But the problem is, there are a lot of compounds that act in combination. From this point of view, we've seen the relationship between these endocrine disrupting pollutants and cancers. It is not the action of a single chemical, but the combined effect that occurs in small doses increases the risk of developing malignancy."

As Garbiñe Larrea explains in his book Cosmetics with Medicinal Plants, every day we serve the body a cocktail of 100 toxic products on average in cosmetics. The gender system also influences this issue, and women supplement the cocktail with an average of 185 toxic components a day and men with 85. But these data come from a research carried out ten years ago, "and it's more days," warned Larrea, who said it's not a study.

"It's a problem for those who use those who don't have. I use well-known brands," some readers may think. The study, conducted by the Danish Consumer Council in 2021, analysed 39 products and showed that known international brands use allergic chemicals and endocrine disruptors. In the 39 products analyzed, 63 contaminants were found, of which 23 were suspected of being endocrine disruptors, resulting in a rate of HIV/AIDS penetration. This disruption relates the loss of fertility and harm to fetuses, the development of type 2 diabetes, obesity and the development of cancer in hormonal organs, among others. In addition, three of these products contained illegal components in Europe.
"At the moment we are not aware of the chemical pollution that produces this simple action we do every day. This year, the International Endocrinology Association has warned to what extent these synthetic components are hacking our hormonal system, and especially in the case of women, mimicking our estrogen, that is, how bad they are doing inside as external estrogens," Larrea said. Some of these problems have been detected in your naturopathic consultation: "I've worked for years in the consultation and I've met a lot of people with skin diseases. These diseases, often not natural or natural, were caused by industrial cosmetics. I was struck by the fact that some of the products made for the youngest were the worst! And that their accumulation was the cause of dermatitis for a year. They all stopped using them for a week and they often turned to the problem." The aforementioned US study also corroborated this: Many of the 921 carcinogenic substances are common in children's lotions and shampoos, and not in anti-lice drugs, where pesticide malation has also been found.

In an interview with Euskadi Irratia, ARGIA journalist Onintza Irureta told her that cosmetics will be "the asbestos of the future". "It was then said that some solar creams had been banned in several countries of the world, as those creams were destroying the coral of Venice. And if it destroys the coral, how do we give it so quietly on the skin? What do we think is not going to have a negative impact? ". He stressed that cosmetics contaminate us twice: "When we use cosmetics in the shower or in the sink we pollute the water and with that water that runs through the sewer we are polluting the Earth and that polluted Earth is again transmitting the contagion. You have to break that cycle." Among other things, the book Cosmetics with Medicinal Plants contributes to this.

Tribute to beauty, but laughing at the norm

We tend to relate the world of cosmetics to beauty. Larrea addresses the theme of beauty from its branches and writes the book from this location: -I put this quote from Susan Sontang in the preamble: 'Being beautiful is not bad, what is wrong is the obligation to be beautiful'. Our choice has been not to reflect in the book that obligation to be beautiful." From the beginning it was very clear that I didn't want to see anyone in the photos: "Because in the book, we didn't want to express the beauty of people. In the current model of cosmetics, both industrial and natural, the beauty of people is used to justify the extent to which the product is good. On the contrary, for us beauty is a value, but it is in other elements: the process of making cosmetics by itself is beautiful, the products we can make are beautiful and the plants we use to make them are beautiful. In that we have put the spotlight on beauty and not on the consequences that we can achieve with the donation of these products in the body, because it seems to us that this canon of beauty that they want to sell us is temporary, that it is difficult to maintain and behind that there is a kind of dictatorship that does not respect the diversity of people and that has a kind of phobia with aging, that would force us to eliminate in the pictures..."

The liberation of the beauty of the aesthetic canon means that in the book we do not find recipes to cover the eyelets, nor makeup formulas. This political option is also reflected in the photographs that Ibai Arrieta has taken for the book, as Arrieta pointed out in the book presentation: "We haven't taken the photos in a lab, we've gone to the sites where medicinal herbs work, and in each photo we've questioned whether we were reproducing the canons of beauty or not," he added. Maitane Gartziandia has been in charge of making the cover and design of the book, and has also participated in the photo sessions. In his words, "industrial cosmetics show in the photos very white products - for this they use colorants," adds Larrea - while the soaps and creams that appear in this book are not so white, have natural colors, are more organic," Gartziandia rounded.
Without falling into the canons of beauty, these three creators have made a great book with ARGIA.

Safe beauty: few cosmetics made with few ingredients

When you start looking at the formulas in the book, it focuses on the fact that cosmetics can be made with few ingredients. For example, the oily serum proposed by Larrea in the book has only two ingredients. The deodorants of the book are made with three components. Solid perfumes are also made with three components and oily with five. Sheepmilk soap is made with five ingredients and soap with more ingredients, cocoa, has ten components (including three essential oils). There is a body cream with six ingredients and the moisturizing cream with more ingredients is for burns with ten ingredients.

Therefore, the cosmetics promoted by Larrea also differ from the industrial in the number of ingredients. He explained that: "In Dermatology there is a concept called 'safe dermal limit', and with chemical pollution and the cocktail effect, our skins have already exceeded that limit they can suffer. The transition to this cosmetic model leads us to choose products that have few ingredients and are well selected and effective. We have to give up on consuming, it's no use making the cosmetics with four ingredients but then putting eight assets, because they're not needed and we'd be falling into an equal trap. In the bathroom there are only a few basic cosmetics and with few ingredients, and that's what we should resort to."

As you know, the marketing of industrial cosmetics gives us a different hook and we often fall: "It emphasizes wonderful elements and we are looking forward to believing in these kinds of wonderful products. In other words, one removes wrinkles, another cellulite... it is evident that they do not get it, and those 'miraculous' ingredients are always remote and exotic, which are expensive to intermediaries". In the words of Larrea, "for the skin there are few plants that are as good as being. Or plantain-grass or hairs -- we can make a good model of cosmetics with five medicinal plants." The book emphasizes that whoever wants to care for the skin should start by taking care of the body and that a cream should not be required to miraculously solve what has worsened the lack of sleep, inadequate feeding or many other factors.

In order not to fall into consumption and optimize resources, the book proposes to review which products have the same ingredients in their formulas, so that buying these ingredients will allow us to produce different products from the book. The same applies to the tools to be used: "This cannot be what requires a big investment at home. To make soap, for example, I use my home cooking battery, I haven't bought any special drums." The culture of reuse is very present in the book, for example, instead of buying soap molds, it proposes to manufacture tetrabriks in milk or other containers.

Reducing waste

The change in the cosmetic model greatly helps to reduce waste, according to Larrea: "The shampoo boats that a person spends on their life are a mountain. That's just in shampoo jackpots. So it was clear that in the book, we had to give formulas to make a solid shampoo, that is, to make an unwrapped shampoo or to wrap it in paper. In the book, I recommend putting almost all the cosmetics we will make at home into glass containers. In fact, if we introduce a warm liquid into the newly finished plastic container, this product is being contaminated with microplastics. And that plastic you're seeing today in the arteries, and that also has to do with fertility problems."

In the photo sessions of the book, Garbiñe Larrea performed the cosmetics of the book, so that the whole process was photographed. The residue that was generated was almost all organic. "If the garbage that is generated is organic, we're fine," he congratulated. In addition to reducing waste, it is clear what is gained: "If you're able to make a lot of detergents and nutritious surfaces to go home, you're gaining a lot of autonomy. You save money and, of course, time."