When scientific concern about global warming made its way to center stage in recent years, the link between personal and environmental health came along with it. Soon enough, it seemed that a boardroom of deciders clapped their hands in glee that the concept of eco-consciousness came prepackaged with its own snappy branding, not to mention big potential for another kind of green — profit. Before you knew it, everything was GREEN! A reasonable question followed: If everything is green, is anything really green? After all, the word natural has been slapped on everything from Pinkberry frozen yogurt to 7Up.

Organic food was long ago taken from the farmers' market to the fluorescent superstore by the power of consumer demand. Now the grooming industry stands at this frontier. Yet as a general rule, people who are making tons of money — like cosmetic companies — don't deal well with change, and so the business of suds and sprays, which grosses about $100 billion annually in the United States alone, remains almost completely unregulated. (The FDA's focus is limited to a concern that cosmetics not be used as vectors for bioterrorism.) The "USDA Organic" label for food came about in 2002, and as of now, it's the strictest certification for organic grooming products. However, it's too difficult for most companies to reach the requirement that 95 percent of ingredients be organic, so many have generated their own less stringent, and rather confusing, seals of approval: Estée Lauder and L'Oréal are two of the companies behind the "Oasis Organic" certification, and Burt's Bees — which was bought by Clorox last year — is pushing a "Natural Products Association" stamp.

This is a step in the right direction. But as long as the cosmetic industry is self-regulating, there will most likely continue to be a lack of research into the health effects of hazardous chemical ingredients, or their buildup in even trace amounts. By and large, coverage of these issues has focused on women, whose cosmetics tend to take up more space in the medicine cabinet. In 2004, a British study found parabens — chemicals widely used as preservatives in everything from deodorant to shampoo — in breast tumor tissue samples, though the evidence that they cause cancer remains insubstantial. "They're considered by the industry to be an endocrine disrupter, which is a chemical that disrupts hormones in the body either by acting like a hormone or blocking hormones," Stacy Malkan, the author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, told me. Not cancer, perhaps, but certainly not encouraging. (The hazardous environmental effects of these chemicals once they go down the drain in wastewater are mostly undisputed.)

There are two major loopholes in labeling laws: Fragrance ingredients don't need to be listed, and neither do contaminants like dioxin and lead. Dioxin — a known carcinogen — is a by-product of petrochemical manufacturing that ends up in many personal-care products. The big question is how unstable chemical ingredients react with one another, and then with a person's own chemistry — into which, not nearly enough inquiry has been made. In 2005, however, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed the landmark California Safe Cosmetics Act, despite aggressive lobbying from Procter & Gamble and the Personal Care Products Council. This law requires manufacturers to disclose any ingredient that's on the state or federal list of chemicals that cause cancer or birth defects.