What are you really putting on your face?

I see all kinds of products claiming to be anti-aging. And I see some amazing claims -- the more amazing the claim, the more doubts I have about a product. But what's a girl to do?

I am a believer in knowing exactly what ingredients and what real impacts cosmetic products will have for me. I am very careful about what I put on my face. It is so hard to evaluate products -- and new products are advertised every day. And there are so many issues, safety and ethical, surrounding cosmetic production. These issues are complex and not easy to resolve.

For example, I use Kiehl's products and have since I was a teenager growing up in New York. Kiehl's started as was an independent company completely aligned with my personal philosophy -- they used safe, natural ingredients, never tested on animals and made reasonable claims about what their products accomplished. Kiehl's had been a Moore's family business in the early 1920s until they sold to L'Oreal in 2000. Kiehl's has an excellence reputation since the Morse's family (a Russian Jewish family orginally named Moskovitz) brought with them a combination of degrees in pharmacology while also adding homeopathic cures and herbal remedies from the old country. But it was in the 1960s that Kiehl's achieved its reputation with its hand mixed, simply packaged natural care products.

In 2000, I, along with all Kiehl's users, had a dilemna because L'Oreal, with its headquarters in Paris, has a history of animal testing and making inaccurate claims. However, L'Oreal has honored it's agreement to maintain Kiehl's mission and philosophy. Perhaps, this is L'Oreal way of making a move to the better.

Since my personal goal is anti-aging with adherence to my personal philosophy -- products that are as effective as they can be, use safe ingredients and are not tested on animals -- there are a few organizations whose websites I regularly check. And here they are:

Skin Deep maintained by the Environmental Working Group, it has a search function and rating system for most products and can be found at: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com

FDA's cosmetic site that lists warning letters to the industry, recalls and much more and can be found at http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/cos-toc.html

In the meanwhile, my product recommendation for Kiehl's remains strong.