The red lipstick...

The perfect combination with your little black dress, but you would never think you’d need to do a double take on your favourite lippy.

I recently received an email forwarded from EC, sent to her from person who works at a breast cancer unit Mt. Sinai Hospital, in Toronto (you may have come across it). It's about lippies that contain Lead, a Dioxin Carcinogens that causes cancer. The longer a lipstick lasts the more Lead is in it.

Normally, I would delete these emails because almost everything causes cancer these days, but as I was going out the other day and about to put on my red lippy I remembered the email naming Shiseido as one of the companies that used Lead as an ingredient.

So I did a quick test, from the instructions of the email:

1. Put some lipstick on your hand.

2. Use a Gold ring to scratch on the lipstick

3. If the lipstick colour changes to black

Then you know the lipstick contains lead.

The Shiseido is the third one from the top which went completely black after a few rubs with the original colour below it, a contrasting deep red.

I tested my two of my other lipsticks a Body Shop (top) and Dior Addict (second from the top) and the colour remained the same.

The email named the following brands to have used lead in their lippies:

- CHRISTIAN DIOR

- LANCÔME

- CLINIQUE

- Y.S.L

- ESTEE LAUDER

- SHISEIDO

- RED EARTH (Lip Gloss)

- CHANEL (Lip Conditioner)

Okay don’t fret about you beauty collection, I’m not saying you should ditch all you lipsticks from these listed brands (I’m not prepared to ditch all of mine either), but be aware of what you use and do the quick test. After all you life shouldn’t come down to the use of a lipstick. Goodbye red lippy!

Lots of love, Little J.