Don't Rub it in

By Leslie Goldman

Those lotions, creams, and gels you slather on a sore muscle, your legs before hair removal, that vaginal itch? Too much could hurt you. Here’s what you need to know.

Lidocaine, methyl salicylate, hydrocortisone. You probably don’t think twice about using over-the-counter (OTC) creams with these ingredients when you need to soothe a sore muscle or bug bite, prep your legs before hair removal, or combat that vaginal itch. If the product’s available without a prescription, it can’t hurt you, right? Wrong.

Take Arielle Newman, for instance, a New York City–area high school track star who died last year from a sports-cream overdose. She’d used large amounts of popular OTC pain-relieving ointments like Icy Hot and Ben-Gay on her sore muscles. The key ingredient in such products is methyl salicylate, which built up in Newman’s body, may have interacted with other aspirin-based meds she was using, and caused her to go into cardiac arrest.

Another case: In 2005, Shiri Berg, 22, of North Carolina died of a lidocaine overdose. Following the instructions she’d been given by the staff at a local hair-removal clinic, she generously applied a numbing gel to her legs, then covered them in plastic wrap. On her way to the clinic to get hair lasered from her legs, Berg passed out. She went into convulsions,  then a coma. Eight days later, she was dead.

Women dying in the name of hair removal? Athletes putting themselves at risk by using mentholated muscle soothers? Extreme situations, to be sure. But with all the stuff each of us slathers on our skin (one study estimates  that women apply 175 chemicals a day from cosmetics, creams, and toiletries alone), it’s no surprise that potential hazards are lurking.

Your skin is designed to protect you from countless insults: from air pollution to murky lake water, from dirty gasoline-pump handles to staph. Skin cells provide a physical barrier, sort of like bricks and mortar, to keep the bad stuff out—most of the time, says Francesca J. Fusco, MD, assistant clinical professor of dermatology at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. “The cells aren’t as tightly packed as real bricks, though, which means things can squeeze by and pentrate.” That’s good news if you want, say, an antiaging wrinkle cream to wage war against your crow’s-feet or an anti-itch product to tackle that exercise-induced rash on your inner thighs. Bad news when strong chemicals meet sensitive or thin skin, cause an allergic reaction, or dangerously flood your bloodstream. Here, we investigate 14 ingredients commonly found in products you may be using right now—and we tell you how to stay safe.