If you don’t have Netflix, feel free to ignore what follows. If you do, then get out your calendar and put a reminder in to watch ‘Stink!’, an important 90 minute documentary for anyone with children – or anyone at all for that matter!
So what’s it about and why the special blog suggesting to watch it? It's the story of an American dad who sadly lost his wife to cancer and was busy raising his daughters as best he could manage. The general outline of the story is that he uncovers a slew of children’s and household products that contain carcinogenic chemicals, and the companies responsible for selling them are getting away with murder. His unyielding research highlights how so many companies don’t seem to care what goes in their products. His desire to protect his daughters from their mother’s fate shows the level of effort needed to uncover answers to the many questions we are entitled to ask when we buy a product.
Special mention is made of synthetic fragrances, something that we have long talked about at Joonya. Anything that smells particularly pleasant is likely best avoided as you’ll probably find “fragrance” written on the ingredients list. What makes things so sinister is that giant corporations have successfully lobbied regulators all over the world to allow them to keep this wording rather than reveal the chemicals inside their ‘fragrance’. Corporates argue their proprietary mix of ingredients are what gives them their secret sauce, but consumers are left in the dark and allowed to be deceived. This inevitably leads to widespread use of carcinogenic chemicals that smell appealing, but if properly labeled most of us would avoid at all costs!
Joonya has long been about transparency and responsible use of materials and ingredients that we would be happy to use on our own children. It was a similar bout of research into baby wipes ingredients that led us to create this business, and we can only hope that as many people as possible wake up to the games that have been played for many years by large companies. One of the great resources we recommend our customers get familiar with is the EWG Skin Deep website. If you have any doubts about the safety of a cosmetic or household product ingredient, pop the name of the chemical into the search field on this page and look at its score –
If it has a 1 or 2 then its safe, 3-6 is ‘sort of but not really’ ok, and 7-10 is definitely a no go.
We hope you enjoy watching ‘Stink!’ and if you enjoy it then tell your friends to watch it too as the more people who know about these issues the better. Ultimately its consumer preferences that drive change and we clearly cannot rely on regulators to look after our precious ones. They are asleep at the wheel!
