Dawyn Cloud-Alter (pictured) thinks it could. At a New Haven event Thursday on the toxic dangers of personal care products, she held up a hair relaxer popular among African-American women to issue a warning.

Cloud-Alter (pictured above) is a Connecticut-based herbalist who developed her own non-toxic line of personal care products, called See the Dawn Natural Skin Care. What she's holding in the photo is a highly unnatural product popular among African American women -- a hair relaxer. (She slaps "glass" stickers over the brand names of products she doesn't recommend.)

To drive home her point about the dangerous ingredients in most of these products, she also read the warning on the box containing a common brand of toothpaste, which advises parents to call the poison control center if their toddler should ingest more than a pea-size amount of it.

Cloud-Alter was one of four speakers on a panel Thursday night at Linsley-Chittenden Hall on Yale's Old Campus. Another was Stacy Malkan, author of Not Just A Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, published in 2007. She said, "Many products routinely contain carcinogens, hormone-disrupting chemicals, chemicals linked to reproductive harm, or toxic to the brain, when safer alternatives are available. We want to give the beauty industry a makeover and really push companies to make safer products." She displayed on the podium some of the toxic products she has researched, including baby shampoo and lipstick. In testing lipsticks, she said one researcher found that most of them contain lead, which can damage the nervous system. When someone in the industry dismissed health concerns, saying lead is only a problem in babies and young children, not adult women, Malkan said she responded, "Where do you think the babies come from?" Not to mention that many young girls love to put on lipstick.

Paul Anastas is director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale. He said he's aware of all the toxic products in use, and their significant health impacts."

"And," he added, "I also appreciate, dare I say, the impotence of our current regulatory environment to address these things in the way they ought to be addressed." He said he's optimistic about the future because of Green Chemistry -- the design of chemical products and chemical processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances."

Gary Ginsberg lectures at the Yale School of Public Health, is the author of the book he's holding in the photo, What's Toxic, What's Not, and host of a new weekly show, "Greener Living with Dr. G" on WTIC radio. He lamented that industry and government are spending billions in the Superfund program to clean up "theoretical exposures," but not doing anything about the exposures to humans' biggest organ, the skin, through the use of soaps, deodorants, shampoos, colognes, etc.

He mentioned several scientific studies that have shown many of the chemicals in these products to be endocrine disrupters, resulting especially in changes to males, like lower semen levels, smaller penises and feminine traits.

The four presentations were followed by a Q&A session with the 40 or so people who attended the event. It was sponsored by the Coalition for a Safe & Healthy Connecticut.