This blog post was submitted by a family member after purchasing cosmetics.
I always knew that many natural (fancy and expensive) beauty products contained oils, proteins and other derivatives from nuts and soy (Aveda loves soy), but I never realized that generic products could also be dangerous territory.
Last week, I went on my monthly trek to spend too much money at CVS. I wandered the isles, gathering strange gels and creams for problems I don’t have. I picked up another little bottle of hand sanitizer, a new nail polish color, some cotton swabs, the standard junk. I grabbed a few random coupons from the ExtraCare card machine to save those extra pennies, and find that one of them is for any CVS brand facial cleanser. I meandered over and pick out a nice new CVS-brand Apricot Facial Scrub. I concluded my shopping, ditched a bunch of the really weird stuff I had picked up, and made my way home.
Later that night, I thought I’d try it out, but something in the back of my mind made me think to read the ingredients, and there it was: “Ingredients: Water, Juglans Regia (Walnut) Shell Powder, …”. I was astounded — who knew facial scrubs had walnuts in them?!
I quickly dug the receipt out of the trashcan and put it in a bag with the facial scrub, ready for me to return the next day and get my money back. I wondered if they’d think it was strange that I was returning a facial cleanser, but they took it off my hands without a problem.
Moral of the story: Read ALL labels, even when you think there’s no possible reason for something to have an allergen in it.