CANDLES
Fall is here, which means the isles at our favorite local stores are filled with beautifully packaged fragranced products to fill our homes with the dreamiest Autumn scents of pumpkin spice lattes and crunchy leaves .. but let’s really take a look at what we are filling our homes with when we use candles, sprays, plugs ins and wax melts — basically any household product that contains the ingredient “fragrance”!
One of the easiest (and most fun) ditches and switches is kicking candles to the curb and replacing them for beautiful diffuser and essential oils!
Why?
Because of all the ingredients you absolutely want to avoid it would be “fragrance”. This is a blanketed term companies are allowed to use to hide their formulations without actually having to tell you what the ingredients are. This is a major loophole in the FDA’s federal law that allows manufacturers to include any ingredient in their products under the name “fragrance” without listing the ingredients.
In 1976, Congress passed the Toxic Substance Control Act (TSCA) which grandfather in between 63,000 – 100,000 chemicals that were on the market. These chemicals were grandfathered in without any testing and are simply unregulated. Today, only about 50% of the chemicals on the market have been subject to any chemical testing at all. Under this act, manufacturers are protected by trade secret laws, so that they do not even have to post what ingredients are in their products. Under the TSCA, manufacturers are protected by trade secrets laws that allow them to keep their ingredient lists a secret.
There is no regulation on this in the US and companies can hide their ingredients behind their labels with this term.
Just a few ways fragrances can negatively affect our bodies:
+ our reproductive system
+ our hormones (did you know perfumes are not allowed to be worn in a fertility laboratory.. hmm, makes you wonder.)
+ our respiratory system
+ our immune system
.. and more.
And most of these chemicals are carcinogens known to cause cancer.
This is absolutely outrageous and should never be allowed in our daily products — products we can so easily buy at the stores. Products our children are using. This information is easily available for you to do further research! Just Google the harmful effects of fragrance and tons of studies, published articles and resource links will pop up for you.
Four years ago we ditched the fragrances and switched them with our diffuser and Young Living essential oils and we’ve never looked back.
The best part?!
Our house smells dreamier than ever without the toxic side effects of synthetic fragrances!
Here are a few articles and resources to learn more about synthetic fragrances:
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