The potentially harmful new toy

Broadcast Date: January 04, 2008
We are being pelted with poison. There are foods that could be killing us slowly and now a toy on sale in one of our big department stores is at best dangerous and at worst, deadly.

The latest Chinese import is called 'Sweet Girl' it's a strawberry flavoured make-up kit aimed at girls 10-years-old or younger. Some ingredients have been banned elsewhere.

Peter Taubert is a lecturer on dangerous chemicals and author of four books on the subject. He says this latest dolled up product should never have been allowed into the country.

"Some of the products as ingredients in it are banned completely in the European Union, some of them, the main preservatives they are using in all four of the products, are banned for being cancer causers in Japan, and yet they're available here to put them on a child's skin," Peter said.

"There's millions of dollars spent on telling us don't smoke, but nothing is being spent on don't eat petro-chemical colours, don't eat things that have four preservatives in it when they could be using one or none."

Some of the products Peter has in the cross hairs will surprise you, like the old favourite sweet, Smarties. At least six of those pretty colours come from somewhere not so pretty.

"They're basically petro-chemicals," Peter said.

Australia's biggest selling biscuit Tim Tam also gets a thumbs down from Peter for colours derived from coal tar.

"In the Tim Tam there are four petro-chemicals," Peter said.

But chocolate coated Scotch Finger biscuits get the thumbs up. "The only colouring used in that chocolate is caramel," he said.

Despite bringing all of these crazy chemicals to light, Peter says no-one in authority, it seems, is prepared to do anything about it, all of these products have been approved and are legal.

Peter says more chemical testing needs to be done and bans brought in where necessary.

"We're poisoning ourselves and we're poisoning our children, at a massive rate," Peter said.

"We're seeing massive rises in kidney disease, in cancer, hyperactivity, asthma. All of these things are on the increase all the time and yet these sorts of products are laced, literally laced, with these chemicals that are implicated in causing those very diseases," Peter said.

Despite the science, we really don't know what these chemicals are doing to our bodies and what the safe levels of intake are, especially with repeated use or what happens when certain chemicals are mixed together.

And that brings us back to the 'Sweet Girl' make-up kit which was brought to our attention by Today Tonight viewer and grandfather, Tony Gilling.

His four-year-old granddaughter was given the make-up kit as a gift, but Tony soon realised something was very wrong with this terrible toy.

"I came in from work one evening and she was playing with it. I could smell it outside, because I'm a painter by trade, I knew the ingredients and I immediately took it off her. I said it was too dangerous," Tony said.

Our chemical expert has carried out a detailed examination of the make-up kit and Peter was shocked by what he found.

He looked at the four products individually, firstly the lipstick that contains something called BHT, pretty innocuous you'd think.

"If you saw the words Butylated hydroxytoluene, would it not alarm you a little bit more?" Peter asked.

"Its one of the nastiest. It's linked with cancer, it's linked with kidney problems, it's linked with pregnancy problems, with damage to sperm, it just goes on and on and on," Peter said.

Next, the lip gloss and some of the ingredients here are almost unpronounceable.

"Isopropyl myristate � now, it's as nasty as you can get," Peter said.

The cream eye shadow has the same chemical crud.

"Isopropyl myristate is listed at five out of five for causing acne," Peter said.

"Most of the colours that are in this, almost all of them, are Asodyes. Asodyes are known human carcinogens. They're outlawed in Japan, many places in the European Union but we allow them," Peter said.

And finally the nail polish which you'll remember drove granddad Tony Gilling to give the make-up kit the flick.

"The nail polish is the worst of all of them. The number one ingredient in this is Ethel acetate. It's a narcotic. Now to breath a narcotic we can have hallucinations, there is kidney damage, there is heart damage, there's damage to the brain," Peter said.

And what makes this a bigger slap in the face for parents, is the cardboard tag on the kids kit. In the finest of print it says "keep out of reach of children".

This year toy giants Mattel and Fisher Price were forced to recall millions of toys made in China because they contained lead, which was also found in many show bags sold in Australia that were later withdrawn from sale.

"The job of business is to make money, make money for their shareholders. The job of people is to make sure that what you buy, especially for our children, isn't harmful to them," Peter said.