I've always heard that makeup is made from some pretty nasty things. I even heard last week while watching TV that placenta is used in many shampoos. Someone I was watching the show with even confirmed this fact after relating the results of a thorough investigation of the shampoo aisle at Walgreens.

Even though it is pretty gross, it does make you wonder why someone even thought of using placenta in shampoos in the first place.

But I found myself even more amazed after reading "Experimenting With Makeup: What Puts the 'Ick' in Lipstick?"

The article deals with the experiments preformed by 11 preteen girls in a class on cosmetic chemistry at the Museum of Science in Boston. The class enlightened these girls to the gritty truths of the components of makeup.

For example, who would've thought that the lipstick you're putting on your lips or the red sports drink that you’re enjoying can both credit their red color to crushed Cochineal beetles.

Considering that many women are known to squeal, shriek, and/or run at the sight of a beetle, or any bug in general, putting crushed beetles in a product that women are going to spread over their lips seems fairly ironic.

Then there is the fact that many perfumes are known to contain ambergris, a whale byproduct. So while women are washing their hair with placenta and smothering their lips with crushed beetles they are also applying whale puke to various parts of their body in an effort to smell better.

But maybe I’m exaggerating a little bit. There aren’t many shampoos that contain placenta, and since real whale puke is now too expensive, perfume companies are now using synthetic ambergris. (Isn’t it reassuring to know that people are producing fake whale puke now?)

The girls at the class were also taught about the effects of lipstick, which can apparently bleed into your lip lines, and according to the girls make you look like Dracula. Furthermore, some pretty expensive department-store lipsticks were shown to leak while some cheap drugstore lipsticks did not.

While this article was interesting enough for the exposed icky ingredients in makeup, it also shows how many women are too preoccupied with looking and smelling good to question what is in these products. It's sometimes amazing how ignorant women remain of something that they use everyday.

All food products must have all their ingredients on their label. Shouldn’t the same rule apply to makeup? Just because whale puke in your perfume will not affect you as much as high fructose corn syrup in your juice doesn’t make it less important.

People should not only have the right to know what exactly they are putting in their bodies but also what exactly they are putting on them, too. Because it would be nice to know if your lips are going to one day remind a bunch of 11-year-old girls of Dracula.