Beauty Safety

June 18, 2009

Tara Lee, co-founder of Best in Beauty LLC in Tampa, is dedicated to providing high-quality, healthy and affordable beauty and personal care products for women and men.

Tara Lee, a former television producer, has started a Tampa company to promote safe personal care products.

When Tara Lee worked as a producer for Home Shopping Network in St. Petersburg, she found that many of the best cosmetic and personal care products came from smaller companies.

When Lee became a mom, she read about toy recalls because of lead in paint. She began to study product labels more closely and found that many cosmetics and other personal care products, such as shampoo and deodorant, contained harmful ingredients that cause rashes, asthma and potentially cancer.

The lead in lipstick alone produced a list of some of the industry’s leading, well-advertised companies.

Those two experiences molded her into an entrepreneur. Lee, 37, eventually became co-founder last year, with Tampa business partner Raul Vazquez, of Best in Beauty LLC in Tampa.

Best in Beauty is a Web site, http://www.bestinbeauty.com, that provides safety information on personal care products as well as hundreds of personal care products — such as makeup, lipstick, skin cream and conditioner — that are healthy to use.

“It’s so common to go into a store and see people reading food product labels,” Lee says. “I’d like to see them read cosmetic labels, too.”

Through its program, Labels for Life, Best in Beauty teaches consumers ways to read cosmetic product labels so they are aware of how some cosmetic manufacturers use harmful chemicals, such as lead, mercury and formaldehyde.

The problem with using these chemicals is that the body absorbs some of them and the liver processes them. If they are toxic, that can cause health problems. For example, a formaldehyde linked to cancer is in some nail polishes and some shampoos. These products have been banned in Japan and Sweden.

However, one challenge in Lee’s business plan has been cost. Because some of the non-toxic organic products can be more expensive than mass-market brands, Lee offers free shipping and handling on orders.

Despite the slightly higher costs, organic personal care product sales are up about 19% since 2007, Lee says.

It is also tough to compete against the million-dollar marketing budgets of the cosmetic industry giants. Lee, who also worked as a producer for “MADtv” and Nickelodeon, only has a staff of two, plus volunteers, at Best in Beauty.

Still, she is hoping her grass-roots message on safety will spread through the Web site and by word of mouth from happy customers.

Lee’s quest is also more than commercial. She is hoping the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will regulate cosmetics and personal care products like it does food and pharmaceuticals.

Companies looking to launch a new drug can wait more than a year for FDA approval. Meanwhile, cosmetics are a self-regulated industry.

Because of that, Lee started the “Message in the Mirror” campaign, depicted graphically on the Web site as handwritten messages in lipstick on mirrors with the abbreviation WTF – Want Toxic Free. It asked consumers to write similar lipstick messages, photograph them and email them to Best in Beauty. The company then sent them to the FDA this past Mothers’ Day and displayed them on its Web site.

Lee likes to mention one statistic: Europe and Canada have banned about 1,300 ingredients from personal care products. The United States has banned 10.

“Educating the consumer will change the industry,” she says. “We want to see people drive us and drive this change. We get a lot of great feedback.”
In the future, Lee hopes to add more healthy products to the Web site and bring back the cosmetics sampling program, so customers can try out products.