If you're standing in the shower with a head full of suds, you might want to rinse off and listen in.

By now, reading Ecoholic has taught you that your personal care products might be peddled as the closest thing to nature since Eve, but in the Wild West of beauty care, they can still be loaded with all kinds of dodgy, cancer-linked chemicals, including one making headlines this month: 1,4-dioxane.

You won't spot it on ingredient lists, but the Organic Consumers Association found 1,4-dioxane in 46 per cent of "natural" and "organic" branded shampoos, body washes and hand soaps tested, including major alt names like Avalon, Jason, Kiss My Face and Nature's Gate (Update: These products have been reformulated to have no detectable levels of 1,4-dioxane according to tests).

In early 2009, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics made an even bigger splash when it commissioned independent lab work on 48 conventional baby products and found 67 per cent tested positive for the chem (including Johnson's Moisture Care Baby Wash, Sesame Street Bubble Bath and Aveeno Baby Soothing Relief Creamy Wash).

What is 1,4-dioxane, and what's it doing hiding behind labels? Well, besides being a multi-talented industrial solvent, 1,4-dioxane shows up in a process called ethoxylation in which harsher chemicals like sudser sodium laurel sulphate (SLS) are "softened up." (SLS's ethoxylated to make milder and more water-soluble sodium laureth sulphate).

It's an unwanted by-product, so that's why it doesn't have to appear on the label, but that doesn't mean health advocates are cool with it.

It's considered a probable carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the European Union has recalled products that contain it. Since 1988, California has forced any product that incorporates 1,4-dioxane (either intentionally or unintentionally) to carry a warning label that reads "This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer."

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