Your perfume matters too

Did you know that your perfume contains chemicals? It’s true! 🤷🏼‍♀️💅 Fragrances and perfume ingredients oftentimes use phthalates to help with skin absorption/penetration and they help the scents last longer and to be seemingly better. Believe it or not phthalates are used regularly in pesticides so that they can penetrate the leaf's outer layer, get into the plant and then ‘protect it’ with the pesticide.

But phthalates are known endocrine disruptors and they can cause significant problems when trying to conceive and also during pregnancy. 😔These chemicals themselves are bad news for a person's ovaries and are associated with an increased incidence of anovulation & PCOS. Moreover, people with high phthalate levels are at more risk of developing primary primary ovarian insufficiency also known as premature ovarian failure. Believe it or not, heavy exposure to phthalates from person-care products have been associated with increased chance of hot flashes in women ages 45 to 54. Uggh. 😰

During pregnancy, there are precise windows of fetal development. When laboratory animals are exposed to high phthalate levels prenataly and at certain stages of fetal development, their male offspring have lower testosterone levels and disrupted genital tracts, particularly shorter anal genital distances. Now in Humans 🤰when women had exposures to phthalates between weeks 8 to 12 of pregnancy, researchers found that the AGD was shorter and the penis was smaller than expected for a of his size whose mother had lower exposure to certain phthalates.

Please make sure you read your labels and try to choose fragrance free products as best you can. It's all about you.

Essential oils or botanical extracts oftentimes are better options. Remember the perfume and fragrance industries are highly unregulated and full of chemicals. Skip the air-freshners and minimize scents. You smell just fine now!😀