The Ugly Truth Behind Beauty On 'Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know'

On this episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know, Ben Bowlin, Noel Brown, and Matt Frederick talk about the dark secrets of the fashion industry. In the first episode about this, they talked about the exploitation of labor, including cases of outright slavery, that occur in the fashion world; now, they’re getting into the environmental impact of personal care and beauty products, like animal testing and animal ingredients, as well as the billions of tons of waste generated by clothing brands thanks to the rise of “fast fashion.” They point out that the environmental effects can be hard to measure, simply because “fashion” incorporates so many different industries, from agriculture and livestock for cotton and leather, shipping the raw materials as well as the finished products, manufacturing, scientific testing, and more.

Besides clothing, the fashion world incorporates makeup and cosmetics as well as skin care, hair care, perfume and cologne, color contact lenses and porcelain tooth veneers; even toothpaste can be categorized as a cosmetic by the FDA if it promises to whiten your teeth. Each of these products must be tested, first to ensure that it won’t cause any harm through contact with the skin, and also to discover how much of the product a human has to ingest before there are detrimental health effects. For a long time, the answer to this problem has been to test the products on animals. Besides testing, animals are also used as ingredients for cosmetics: a waxy substance used to help scent stay in perfume is extracted from the stomach lining of whales; the lining of shark’s livers is added to lipstick and eye makeup. The process to get these ingredients is not exactly pleasant for the animals, and neither is the testing and purposeful poisoning in animal testing facilities. 

Each of those products has to be packaged, as well, and usually that means plastic; in packaging alone the fashion industry generates an enormous amount of waste, to say nothing of the carbon emissions from shipping and manufacturing. There’s also the clothes themselves: Thanks to the rise of super cheap, widely available clothing, consumers are more likely to purchase clothing to wear only for a year or two before discarding it. Since the clothing isn’t made to last, there’s not much of a resale market for the clothes, so they end up in a landfill. And since a lot of clothes have plastic woven into the fabric, such as polyester blends, they aren’t biodegradable. There are companies making strides to overcome these environmental issues, but it’s going to take a lot to move away completely. Find out all the details about the dark environmental secrets of the fashion industry, and what’s being done to combat it, on this episode of Stuff They Don’t Want You To Know.

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