TVScope:When in the classic country song, Ruby "painted up her lips and rolled and curled her tinted hair", we now know after watching this dramatic exposé of the toxins in beauty products, that she was in fact bringing much more than her love to town, writes Olive Travers.
Beauty Addicts - How toxic are you? Channel 4, Thursday, 11th October, 8pm
She was also, in her lipstick and hair dye, bringing some of the 1,000 hazardous chemicals including Parabens (hormone disrupters), triclosan (a toxic preservative), and, if she had gone for eye shadow, possibly arsenic. Beauty may only be skin deep but these chemicals go through the skin and hit the bloodstream immediately, and then are transported to vital organs, such as the kidneys and the liver.
This was stunningly demonstrated in the testing for chemicals of two real-life Rubys, the beauty-obsessed sisters Charlotte and Emma, who between them use 70 different beauty and cosmetic products every day.
They may have been extreme examples of "cosmeticaholics" but a recent study found that British women are among the heaviest users of cosmetics in Europe, spending £6.14 billion on beauty products a year, encouraged, no doubt, by the £600 million the industry spends in that time on marketing its products.
Presuming we Irish women are no different, we, like them, use 12 toiletry products a day, and ingest through our skin and mouth up to 5lbs of chemicals a year.
The marketing slogan "Because you're worth it" took on a whole new meaning, when after just eight days of removing all beauty products from her life, Charlotte's alarming pre-detox reading of 650mg of Parabens per litre of urine fell to 21mg (730mg per litre is the highest level recorded in humans). Her level of tricolsan, a common, potentially toxic preservative found in toothpaste and bodywash, fell from 490mg per litre to zero.
The high-maintenance sisters were coaxed into using alternative, chemical-free beauty products, and while not finding them as effective as their old war paints, the dramatic results of the pre- and post-detox readings encouraged them to persevere, which is good news for the minority producers of genuinely chemical-free beauty products.
Read the small print though was the message when the programme took to the streets to discover that, like the illusion products themselves create, consumers were seduced by the wholesome packaging and duplicitous claims that products are natural and pure. Even the so called "Simple" moisturising shampoo contains 23 man-made chemicals, including the ubiquitous foaming agent sodium laureate sulphate, which is also used to degrease your car engine.
So perhaps because you are worth it, it's time to change your shopping habits and to consider that when Bob Dylan serenaded Ramona with "Your cracked country lips, I'm still longing to kiss", was he telling us that kissing cracked lips was preferable to absorbing some of the 23 man-made chemicals found in Emma's favourite fizzy peach lip gloss?