A Big Fukitol From the Fringe

How we get boxed in, dumbed down, and chemically compliant—all in the name of the ugliest parts of Us vs. Them

Sometimes you just feel out here all alone.

I’m feeling rant-y today. Maybe it’s because it’s day five of rain in June when, for Pete’s sake, we should finally have some warmth and sunshine. Maybe it’s because I’m jealous Sabrina Carpenter is a better marketer than me and she can sing, too. Maybe it’s just that I can’t find a damn bottle of salad dressing in the store that is made with ACTUAL extra virgin olive oil.

So, if you’re at your own frustration capacity, you may want to sit this one out.

I am so thoroughly exhausted by every single thing becoming a political issue. We have lost our collective minds. The tribalism happening around us right now is insidious. We’ve abandoned all common sense and replaced it with a My Team vs. Your Team tug-o-war that isn’t serving any of us. We sound like a bunch of idiots who’ve lost all rationality and critical thinking ability. I’m sick of it.

Lumping In

When I was a teenager, adults would aggravate me to no end by lumping me in with everyone else my age, as if I had no individual identity. “Well, you teenagers all think…”. Stop right there. No, we don’t “all” think anything—and how would you even know? Have you asked all of us? I didn’t accept that degree of generalization then and I certainly don’t now. I’m not a carbon copy of everyone who happens to be my age. Or my gender. Or my socio-economic status. Or my level of education. Or my voting history. Or anything. I think for myself and I don’t fit neatly into a box.

I’m seeing this now on such a grand scale; it’s almost impossible to avoid. If you feel a certain way about ONE issue, you must be on this team. If you feel the opposite, you’re automatically dumped into the other team. That’s just stupid. Most people are more complex than that. The reason we part our hair down the middle and do this whole Us vs. Them bullshit is because we’ve been conditioned to. Are you falling for that? I’m not.

Case in point: chemicals in cosmetics.

I’m no fan of the FDA. If that offends you, stop reading.

No, if that offends you, read this twice. Because if you’re bothered by my disdain of the FDA, then you have absolutely no idea what they do or don’t do with regard to Americans’ chemical load.

Let’s start with cosmetics.

Years ago, I worked for a cosmetics startup. For reasons I can’t get into, I won’t disclose the name of the brand, but suffice it to say it doesn’t exist in its original framework anymore.

Not only did working there provide a crash course in cosmetic chemistry, but I got an up close and personal look at the power and influence wielded by the giants. The brand I was working with was a disruptor. They invented a face makeup whose molecules could not be absorbed into human tissue. This was revolutionary, since most foundations contained cyclopentasiloxane, which is a silicone compound (abbreviated D5) known for its spreadability and thermal stability. Research shows that D5 is found in almost all breast cancer tissue. In other words, it’s a known carcinogen and your body absorbs it. I bet you have some in your makeup or shampoo right now. Go check the labels.

The company I worked for set out to fix this issue. You’d think we’d instigated a war. I used to think gangsters ran around in fedoras with Tommy guns. Apparently, they wear sensible suits and stilettos. They wanted to shut us down. Bad. How dare we attack industry norms!

Turns out, at the time I was working with this startup, the cosmetic industry was The Wild West. The FDA allowed the companies to “self-regulate”. That’s a clever way to say do what you want as long as you don’t kill anyone. In fact, the FDA didn’t start paying attention until lawsuits resulted in public outcry (Sea Breeze toner burns, anyone?)

In 2022, as part of an omnibus spending bill, the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act (MoCRA) was signed—the first update in 80+ years! This new bill gave the FDA the ability to recall harmful products and require adverse effect reporting. Production facilities now need to be registered every two years, and product names, ingredients, allergens, brand names, and location of production must now be submitted to the FDA.

Isn’t it amazing that none of this was previously required?

But before you get excited that the government intervened, let me illustrate just how paltry that intervention is:

• MoCRA still doesn’t require any pre-market approval. Let’s be honest, if they did, there’d never be a new cosmetic. The FDA is too slow and too bureaucratic to be involved on the front end. However, this also means a brand can whip up a potion in a bathtub operation and the FDA won’t care until someone has a reaction.

• MoCRA requires that a company maintain records that a product is “safe”, but doesn’t define safe. There’s no requirement for independent third-party testing. The brands are still self-policing.

• MoCRA gives fragrances a pass. Brands don’t have to list individual ingredients in perfumes; they can just say “fragrance”. Well, a lot of junk can be in “fragrance”, including irritants for those sensitive to them.

• MoCRA doesn’t ban the 1,300 cosmetic ingredients banned in the EU. THIRTEEN HUNDRED. We ban 11. It’s laughable.

The Lie of Clean

When we launched our brand, we tried to get that little leaping bunny on our labels. To their credit, the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics in the US and Canada makes their cruelty-free designation hard to come by.

But all the rest of the marketing lingo on labels is basically lies or half-truths at best. “Clean” has no definition. “Toxin-free”, “chemical free” and “Non-toxic” are all meaningless since “toxin” isn’t defined by the FDA and everything, including water, is technically a chemical compound. Hemlock and arsenic are both “natural”. Would you like them in your lipstick?

The scariest part: some indie brands will skip all preservatives AND skip all microbial testing. That means the cosmetics can be unstable and full of bacteria just to say they’re all natural. Hard pass on that.

Skinfluential

By now, I hope you understand why I’m no friend of the FDA. They don’t need me: they have loads of other really rich friends who speak for pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies. If you doubt that, you get a head pat and a cookie and a big ol’, “Well, bless your heart.”

The part that is frustrating me most right now is all the marketing to young children happening on TikTok and other socials. Kids as young as eight- and nine-years old are in Sephora and Ulta shopping for skin care! Brands that glorify youth above all else are actually now peddling their products directly to the youth!

What is this added chemical load doing to childrens’ developing endocrine systems? Maybe the cosmetic companies pretend they aren’t directly marketing to tweens, but the social influencers they partner with and the bright and playful packaging they produce tell another story. I don’t even want to list the most loathsome brands for fear of inadvertently promoting them. Suffice it to say, nine-year-olds don’t need glow mist.

If you think I’m mad about this, don’t ask me about food

I read something derogatory about people who fry potatoes in beef tallow today, as if doing so made the person a fringe political pawn. Again, politicizing everything is an exhausting waste of time. Ghee and tallow have been in use long before we figured out how to douse seeds with chemicals to squeeze oil from them by way of the industrial production of the last hundred years. Do most of us even realize cottonseed oil was introduced to the American food supply because cotton manufacturers didn’t know what to do with their toxic byproducts? They detoxified them just enough to sell them to food companies on the cheap. Despicable x 2.

If wanting food to be as close to its natural source as possible makes me fringe, then grab my flapper dress.

I guess my fringe has fringe

Food that Tastes Like Food

Have you been to Europe? South America? Asia? Have you eaten a piece of fruit there? It tastes like something, unlike the produce we buy in American supermarkets that is picked before it's ripe, sprayed with ethylene gas, and stacked in pyramids so we can buy it for a premium. Do you actually think there’s absolutely no connection between 1 in 31 American kids developing autism (1 in 23 for boys in NJ) and the chemicals we layer into every modern child’s life? Are Amish children suffering the same autism rates? (They’re not. It’s 1 in 271 among them.) Even our healthiest foods aren’t healthy when our mono-crop agricultural soil is so contaminated. It’s maddening.

When we get sick, we ingest even more chemicals

After we poison ourselves with low-nutrition, high-chemical foods, we turn to the medical establishment for help. The big-profit flywheel is working!

When my pediatrician was willing to torture my highly reactive child with shot after shot, sometimes four at a time, to keep her “on schedule” rather than keeping her safe and healthy, I realized the drug companies and medical profession were all in on the charade parading as healthcare in America. In the last 20 years, it’s only gotten worse. And we’ve all gotten sicker.

Are the dots connecting?

A Big Fukitol From the Fringe

I want the government out of my body, my bedroom, and my bank account. Does this make me fringe? If you think so, I don’t give a whit. I’ll dance on that fringe with two fingers in the air.

Don’t box me into this or that. I don’t care who’s in the seat, as long as they start looking at the big picture of American illness apart from big agriculture, apart from big pharma, apart from big beauty. Apart from all the big lies for big profits.

But, why and how will anyone do that when lobbyists are still allowed in?

The FDA has never been a neutral, altruistic catch-all with our best health interests purely at heart. So, no, it’s not above criticism. Any organization that forces an acknowledgment on a bottle of Vitamin C but not on chemical skincare for tweens or salad dressing made with canola oil has a long way to go.

It’s On Us

We’re all responsible for our own health advocacy. Yet it’s extremely hard and time consuming to find information that hasn’t been contaminated by one special interest or another. Studies are bought and paid for by the organizations their confirmation bias benefits. Even the food pyramid was a farce.

I’m interested in all of this; I read up on it from sources of every color. Not everyone shares my level of curiosity about it. So, how is the average information person supposed to shop for and feed their family when the goods on offer are mostly all bad?

If you’re vocal about it, and if you god-forbid want to cross the intentionally divisive aisle to work on something that can actually benefit everyone, including the non-voting populance, you’re practically a pariah.

I’m tired of food, healthcare, and medicine being politicized. I’m tired of everyone’s rampant tribalism. I’m tired of curious people being pigeonholed or much, much worse. I’m tired of common sense being uncommon. If there’s nothing else in the entire world we can and should all agree on, it’s having the cleanest, best, and most wholesome food, the least toxic beauty products, and medicine whose only agenda is your complete wellness.

My simple demands

Is it too much to want conscientious soil management, heirloom seed crops, minimal food processing, honest labeling, ethical marketing, partners in holistic human longevity, and nobody putting me in a box for supporting radical common sense? Only if it’s also too much to want a pet dolphin and a cell signal that doesn’t drop in my front yard.

All seem equally impossible.

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I’m not always rant-y. If you want to read some much lighter and more fun stuff, here are some links…

I Don’t Always Faint, But When I Do, It’s Usually in Public

Buying Teen Clothes at the Hooker Store

I Want to be a License-Revoking Vigilante