What They Put In Lip Gloss Is Banned From Food | Laura DiGirolamo, ESQ
episodePreviously titled “Lip Service: The Dirty Secret Behind Celebrity Beauty Brands | Laura DiGirolamo, ESQ” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 5, 2026
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What shocking ingredients are commonly found in lip products?
80 to 90% of the lip products you're buying doesn't matter whether it's in a drugstore or whether it's in a very prestige outfit. 80 to 90% of them are made with microplastics. What are the terms that mean plasticizers on the ingredients list? Polymer. Copolymer is a plastic synthetic wax. Lip products are classed as cosmetic. And when you say cosmetic, that means topical. If we're looking at them as topical products, but we are flavoring them like food, we're reapplying them way more today than we were 30 years ago. Some people are reapplying up to 40 times a day. You're one of the first. that I'm telling this about publicly. This is nerve-wracking because this is a multi, multi-billion dollar industry, and it's just me.
And I need help from people like yourself who are unafraid to stand up and go, hey, wait a second, this is wrong.
You've spent your whole life eating your lip products. Every lip gloss, every lipstick, every flavored balm, every vanilla frosted lip mask marketed to teenage girls at Sephora.
How does the beauty industry classify lip products compared to food?
The beauty industry regulates these products almost exactly the same way it regulates body lotion. But the skin on our lips is completely different and we're ingesting it. Today's guest says one of the biggest blind spots in modern beauty is hiding in plain sight. Products designed for the mouth are being treated like they never enter the body at all. Laura DiGirolamo is a beauty attorney and beauty industry insider turned whistleblower. She helped pioneer clean beauty before clean beauty was even a thing. She advised giants like Sephora on emerging trends and invented one of the first premium healthy deodorants long before wellness beauty became mainstream. She is also the founder of Yom Beauty, a completely clean lip mask with food grade ingredients and zero plastic.
If you listen to my bombshell interview this year with Jason Karp on the inside baseball of the food industry, as well as plastic, you are going to love this episode. Same energy. Laura says that many lip products may contain ingredients never intended to be ingested, including plastic, petroleum derivatives, artificial dyes, and compounds already restricted in food in parts of the world. Prepare for some seriously shocking revelations about the lip cosmetic industry and what the science shows is being sold to us without any safety regulation. Watch this episode on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. The show is free, and the only thing I ask for in return is your five-star reviews, which takes less than six seconds to do.
Please welcome beauty lawyer Laura DiGirolamo to Culture Apothecary.
What are the health implications of ingesting lip products?
Laura, you've spent 20 years in beauty now, and you helped build clean beauty before there ever was clean beauty. Because now we hear this phrase all the time, but you were really at the forefront of this entire explosion.
I had built a brand that was the precursor to clean because natural was so confusing that we decided to list out the ingredients that we committed to not using. And then once Sephora saw that people were responding to this, hey, we're going to list that we don't use petrochemicals, we don't use phylates, we don't use, and it was a laundry list. Then they started to see there's an opportunity and Sephora was one of the first, if not the first, to actually define what clean beauty was and then to start encouraging brands to. to go exclusively with them and that's how that whole movement started. But I was at the forefront of that and I saw an opportunity to create the world's first healthy deodorant in the Sephora context.
So a cool deodorant that didn't have aluminium or any of the other ingredients including propylene glycol. And to make that into a solid stick was a real chemical feat. So when I say chemical, anything that you use, sometimes you can refer to as a chemical molecule, obviously. I don't mean it is full of chemicals. I mean, it was just very difficult to create with a cosmetic chemist, a solid stick that didn't use any of those ingredients that people didn't want under their armpits.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What shocking ingredients are commonly found in lip products?
0:00–1:23
2
How does the beauty industry classify lip products compared to food?
1:23–2:50
3
What are the health implications of ingesting lip products?
2:50–4:33
4
How does Laura DiGirolamo's background influence her views on beauty regulations?
4:33–5:24
5
What changes are needed in lip product regulations?
5:24–6:12
6
How does the Lip Service Alliance plan to address these issues?
6:12–7:18
7
What are the differences between cosmetic grade and food grade ingredients?
7:18–8:26
8
What steps can consumers take to make informed choices about lip products?
8:26–1:16:55
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
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