But there's no significance. There's no evidence the precautionary principle works at all. As observed in a comment above, when you remove car deaths and murder

But there's no significance. There's no evidence the precautionary principle works at all. As observed in a comment above, when you remove car deaths and murders (things unrelated to chemical regulation) US life expectancy is the same. Just because it's not killing everyone doesn't mean it's not killing a lot of people or making their health and happiness worse That logic is faulty. Allowing things until proven dangerous can be both not killing everyone and not killing a lot of people or making anyone's health or happiness worse. For the precautionary principle to make a detectable difference to people's health, dangerous cosmetics would have to be staggeringly common, and cosmetics firms would have to be staggeringly willing to repeatedly sell cosmetics known to be dangerous. But that doesn't seem to be the case: are there any cases in recent times of Americans being seriously harmed by unexpectedly dangerous cosmetics? I mean, even just one?