Is the sodium lauryl sulfate in my shampoo killing me?
If you use shampoo to wash your hair, it probably works up into a nice thick lather. This nice thick lather, for many of us, really defines the shampooing experience. Imagine, then, discovering that this lather could kill you. In 1998, an e-mail first made the Internet rounds that instilled fear in shampoo users around the globe. This e-mail, anonymous of course, claimed that your shampoo could be giving you cancer. The culprit, according to the e-mail, is sodium laureth sulfate, also known as SLES. This ingredient creates lather. In fact, the more common lather-producing agent is sodium lauryl sulfate, SLES’s less-expensive cousin. The molecules are very similar, though. Sodium lauryl sulfate is a detergent, a crystalline salt of sulfated lauryl al
