Why does Crunchi use titanium dioxide?Updated 4 months ago

Titanium dioxide (Cl l 77891) is an ingredient used in almost all color cosmetics as a white or opacity pigment. Unless the cosmetic color is black or very dark, it contains some level of titanium dioxide. The safety of titanium dioxide has been in discussion as the EU recently banned its use as a food additive due to inconclusive evidence pertaining to genotoxicity. For many reasons, these concerns do not apply to Crunchi products: 1) There are two types of titanium dioxide: nanoparticle, and non-nanoparticle. The titanium dioxide used in Crunchi products is non-nanoparticle. This means that the particles are larger than 100 nanometers (nm). Most of the research surrounding adverse health effects is on nanoparticle size titanium dioxide from 1 nm to 30 nm. 2) Large particle (non-nanoparticle) titanium dioxide is presumably large enough to not penetrate the skin surface in topical cosmetic products and therefore poses no concern for consumer safety. 3) Our lip products and their potential for unintentional ingestion is also not an applicable concern as quantities used in the research are the equivalent to consuming hundreds to thousands (or more) of whole finished lip crayons or glosses a day. There is a known health concern pertaining to titanium dioxide if inhaled in a loose powder form. The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) identifies inhalable titanium dioxide as possibly carcinogenic. To avoid this risk, Crunchi does not use titanium dioxide (of any size) in any loose powder formulations. At this time, we will continue to monitor the research surrounding the safety of titanium dioxide but are not currently concerned with continued use based on the amount used in our lip products (unintentional ingestion) or other color cosmetics (topically applied) and the fact that our titanium dioxide is never nanoparticle.