Trump Fragrances Come With a Whiff of Toxins
With questionable beauty product ingredients and practices in the public eye so much lately, Yahoo Beauty decided to see how the vanity fragrance products of a certain presidential candidate would fare regarding safety — and the results were grim.
The Trump Organization’s two fragrance lines — Empire by Trump and Success by Trump — include products containing ingredients linked to hormone disruption, skin and lung irritation, organ system changes, and cancer. That’s according to the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database, which catalogues the ingredients and safety risks of more than 62,000 personal care products and rates them on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the worst.
Three Trump products — Success by Trump Eau De Toilette Spray, Empire by Trump Shower Gel and Donald Trump the Fragrance Eau de Toilette — earned high numbers on the danger scale, rating 10, 9 and 8, respectively.
These products received these ratings because of ingredients that include oxybenzone, known to cause cellular-level changes, allergic reactions and endocrine disruption; benzyl salicylate, another endocrine disruptor; isoeugenol and citral, linked to eye, skin and lung irritation; BHT, linked to cancer; and retinyl palmitate, linked to cancer and organ-system toxicity.
Others products in the fragrance line, including Empire by Trump After Shave Balm, Success by Trump Shower Gel and Success by Trump Alcohol Free Deodorant, earned 6, 5 and 4, respectively, for containing additives such as phenoxyethanol and Steareth-100, linked to organ-system toxicity.
The Success product line, launched in 2012, was followed in 2015 by the Empire line, described in a press release as “the perfect accessory for the confident man determined to make his mark with passion, perseverance, and drive.” It said the scent contained “bold notes of peppermint, spicy chai and a hint of juicy apple,” “a masculine floral comprised of orange flower and jasmine blended with exotic tonka beans” and “elements of amber and seductive musk.”
Although July 2015 reports noted that Perfumania, a division of manufacturer Parlux, was “winding down its retail business with the Donald Trump fragrance brand,” the Trump merchandise site still takes online buyers to the Perfumania site to purchase any of the fragrance products. A Parlux representative did not respond to a request for comment from Yahoo Beauty.
To be fair, although the Trump products seem to be brimming with suspect chemicals, they are far from alone in that: The beauty product world is filled with questionable additives, from the lead found in men’s hair dyes to the parabens found in toothpaste and the diazolidinyl urea that lurks in makeup and moisturizers. It’s why bipartisan legislation to tighten up Food and Drug Administration oversight of such products is currently pending in the U.S. Senate — although it’s a bill that presidential candidate Donald Trump, who’s in favor of paring down government regulations, would be likely to kill if given the chance.
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