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Your bathroom shelf deserves the same audit as your kitchen — some of what’s sitting on it may be working against the hormone balance you’re trying to rebuild.
Skincare & Environmental Triggers
You already know I want you looking at your kitchen — the Three Drivers (grains, sugar, and seed oils), the pantry purge, all of it. But your bathroom shelf deserves the same audit, because a lot of what’s sitting on it isn’t just “not doing anything.” Some of it is actively working against the hormone balance you’re trying to rebuild.
Here’s the piece most women don’t know: some of the most common ingredients in sunscreens, moisturizers, and body lotions are what’s called endocrine-disrupting chemicals — compounds that can interfere with how your own hormones signal in your body. A market analysis of cosmetic products sold in the EU identified dozens of suspected endocrine-disrupting ingredients across a sample of more than 1,000 products, with UV filters among the categories most represented. Ingredients that turn up repeatedly in that kind of screening include avobenzone, octisalate, and butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT).
I want to be careful with how I say this, because I’m not here to scare you into throwing out every bottle in your house tonight. This is exposure data, not a study proving these specific products cause your specific symptoms. But if you’re already working hard to reduce your hormonal and inflammatory load through food, it makes sense to look at what’s absorbing through your skin every single day too — especially in a season of life where your hormone system is already recalibrating and has less buffer to spare.
Start with what touches the most skin surface area, most often. That’s usually your daily moisturizer, your sunscreen, and anything you leave on rather than rinse off. Leave-on products get more absorption time than a cleanser you wash away in thirty seconds.
Flip the bottle over and scan the ingredient list for the three named above — avobenzone, octisalate, and butylated hydroxytoluene (sometimes listed as BHT). You don’t need to memorize a scary list of forty chemicals. Start with these three, since they’re among the ones that show up most often in this kind of screening.
Mineral sunscreens using zinc oxide or titanium dioxide as the active ingredient are a straightforward swap for chemical sunscreens containing avobenzone or octisalate — same sun protection job, different mechanism, no absorption-based hormone concern.
For BHT, it shows up more in the “preservative and stabilizer” section of ingredient lists than in the marketing copy, so it’s worth a genuine label check rather than trusting a product’s front-of-bottle claims.
Give yourself permission to do this gradually. You don’t need a same-day bathroom purge. As products run out, replace them with a cleaner alternative. That’s sustainable. A panic-driven overnight swap of everything you own is not — and it’s not necessary here.
This isn’t about achieving some impossible standard of purity. It’s about reducing the toxic burden your body is managing at the same time it’s trying to recalibrate hormonally — one more input working with you instead of against you.
Source: Fernández-Martín ME, Tarazona JV. Market analysis of the presence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in cosmetic products intended for oncological patients and other vulnerable groups. Eur J Dermatol. 2024;34(1):40–50. PMID 38557457.
Ready to work together?
If this is sounding familiar — the flares, the rashes, the reactions that seem to come out of nowhere — you don’t have to keep guessing. Let’s connect the dots between your hormones, your environment, and your skin, and build a plan that actually addresses what’s driving it.
Reach out and start connecting the dots.