OCTOBER 7, 2009 — “A groundbreaking new book, Toxic Beauty: How Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Endanger Your Health and What You Can Do About It, issues a long-overdue wake-up call to the public on the dangers of ingredients in common cosmetics and personal-care products whose safety most people naively take for granted,” the book’s author, Dr. Samuel S. Epstein, said in a press statement on Wednesday.

Epstein is professor emeritus at the University of Illinois-Chicago and has published 15 books and more than 270 scientific articles.

“We are all playing Russian roulette with toxic-laden personal-care products that we apply to our skin, and to the skin of our infants and children everyday,” Epstein said. His release asked, “Why do so few mothers know of the risks to their infants and children from using personal-care products, including sunscreens? How can the cosmetic and personal-care products industry recklessly continue to ignore these dangers?”

Several groups are now questioning the safety of chemical sunscreen products, which manufacturers recommend for daily usage even when sunburn isn’t possible. One such group, the Washington, D.C. based Environmental Working Group, has called for the government to pursue more aggressive product safety testing on chemical sunscreen products, which the group says includes toxins that CDC research has shown seeps into our bodies and is present in 97 percent of everyone’s urine.