Giovanni Munoz Leon, 51, and Nury Alejandra Herrera Palacio, 32, both of Ontario, were arrested Thursday following a months-long Riverside County Sheriff’s Department investigation.

Leon and Palacio were slated to make a joint initial court appearance Monday afternoon at the Southwest Justice Center in Murrieta.

Both are being held in lieu of $500,000 bail — Leon at the Byrd Detention Center in Murrieta, and Palacio at the Smith Correctional Facility in Banning.

According to sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Thomas, the defendants allegedly snatched a number of beauty products from the shelves of a Lake Elsinore outlet in late August, then proceeded to flee the location without paying. The estimated loss to the business was $3,000.

Thomas said the ensuing investigation did not turn up sufficient evidence to reveal the perpetrators’ identities, but Leon and Palacio returned to the same store on Sept. 28 and allegedly grabbed $2,000 in merchandise before fleeing again. This time, investigators were able to procure enough information to ultimately identify the alleged thieves, he said.

“They determined that from June to October of this year, Leon and Palacio were responsible for over 50 thefts within California, totaling $123,000 in (stolen) merchandise,” the sergeant said.
Detectives obtained a search warrant for the pair’s shared residence in the 2500 block of East Riverside Drive, “where evidence connecting them to the thefts was recovered,” Thomas said.

“During the search, stolen clothing was located from multiple retail establishments,” he said.

Neither defendant has documented prior felony convictions in Riverside County.

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For Barbara Jacques, it began with a simple question: Why? 

In 2010, shortly after learning she was pregnant, Jacques’ physicians identified a tumor in her ovaries. It was benign, and Jacques safely carried the pregnancy to term. But she was haunted by the question of what could have led to the health scare in the first place. 

“The more I started learning about what was going on with my body, I learned that a lot of what we put in your body and on your skin is not as safe as we think it is,” said Jacques, a native of Miami with Haitian roots. She also learned that women of color are at especially high risk from harmful beauty products. 

“I just became even more curious about the formulation process. Why were these ingredients in the products? And then I started learning that Black women are exposed to twice the amount of toxins in beauty products.”

Few Americans realize that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not require approval of cosmetic products and ingredients, other than color additives, before they go on the market. 

As a result, the beauty aisle in a typical pharmacy is lined with products that contain  potentially harmful ingredients, including behavioral toxins, carcinogens, developmental toxins, endocrine disruptors, heavy metals, neurotoxins and reproductive toxins.

Public health officials in the United States are aware of the presence of these substances yet have taken few steps to curtail their use. The nations of the European Union have outlawed the use of more than 1,600 chemicals in cosmetics; by comparison, U.S. regulators have banned about 11.

The use of these chemicals disproportionately impacts people of color. African Americans make up 14 percent of the population, but 85 percent of the nation’s spending on ethnic hair and beauty products.

As a health and environmental justice reporter for Inside Climate News, I recently wrote about a study that explored how racialized notions of beauty drive women of color to use potentially harmful beauty products. As a USC Center for Health Journalism 2023 National Fellow, I plan to research this topic from multiple perspectives. I want to interview researchers as they work to identify harmful ingredients in beauty products and advocates who curate online databases of “clean” cosmetics.

My interest in this topic is equal parts personal and professional, and it is deeply informed by my own lived experience. I am a Black woman and a 12-year breast cancer survivor, and I want to interview other people of color who have been diagnosed with cancers and related ailments that they worry may have been caused by their use of beauty products. I plan to examine successful models in other countries for regulating harmful cosmetics and working to safeguard consumer safety.

And, like Barbara Jacques, whom I interviewed for a story about Black women and beauty products, I now have so many questions: Is there a way to quantify the extent to which the health care system has been taxed by illnesses that might be traced to harmful cosmetics? What role do racialized notions of beauty play in the disproportionate use of beauty products by African Americans? Can social networks and greater access to information about harmful products help protect public health? Or do race and class trump all other concerns?

I am grateful that the Fellowship year will allow me to explore these issues in greater depth and help give readers insight into the forces by which some people may, quite literally, be putting their health at risk for beauty’s sake. 

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As the saying goes: beauty is only skin deep. Yet the way beauty is defined often inflicts damage that cuts deeper. In her research, Ami Zota, an incoming faculty member in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences, has exposed the hidden risks of chemicals used in beauty products and documented their disproportionate harms among women of color.

Beyond a simple account of environmental risk factors, Zota, who will join the Columbia Mailman faculty in June, has widened her scientific lens to account for the roles played by social forces and societal injustices in shaping exposures. Over the last decade, she has shared her insights on these injustices with community groups and policymakers to change how consumer products are used and regulated.

Zota’s research on beauty products and intimate care products uncovered high levels of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in the bodies of the women who use them—especially Black and Latinx women. Uniquely, her research linked heavy use of these products to racist attitudes and policies around personal appearance—for example, workplace rules prohibiting dreadlocks. “Most of how we think of the use of these products is individualized, and we don’t typically think about the social context and structural factors that drive how we define beauty,” she says. “In fact, environmental exposures are determined by upstream factors like structural racism.”

In 2019, she was invited to testify about her findings to California policymakers as they considered new regulations on beauty and personal care products. Passed in 2020, the Toxic Free Cosmetics Act bans the use of 24 hazardous ingredients in these products. Just last week, she testified to Washington State legislators who are proposing a similar bill in their state. California and New York have also passed laws banning discrimination based on hairstyle and texture.

Zota, who is currently an associate professor at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, traces her interest in environmental justice to a semester she spent in Madagascar during her undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “I saw how community health and wellbeing were tied to ecological health. Poverty was a threat to the natural world.” She went on to earn an MPH and ScD in environmental health at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and completed post-docs at the Silent Spring Institute and UCSF.

Her research on phthalates and other environmental health risks has attracted considerable media attention. Journalists regularly seek out her insights, knowing her reputation as an environmental health expert who uses clear language. She also brings diversity to the usual roster of voices. “As a woman of color, I offer a different perspective in a field that is still largely composed of older white men,” says the professor, whose parents were both born in rural India. “But I came to realize I don’t want to be alone in that role.”

It was that realization that led her to create Agents of Change in Environmental Justice, a leadership training program for early-career environmental health scientists from systematically marginalized backgrounds. Launched in 2019, the program emphasizes research translation, science communication, and public engagement around topics in environmental justice. “We need new solutions. Business as usual is not going to help us with monumental challenges like climate change,” Zota says. “These younger scientists have a lot of ideas that can help us. I want them to become the face of this field.”

So far, four Columbia Mailman trainees (past and present) have participated as fellows in the nine-month program. Ashley Gripper, ‘17 MPH, now a PhD student at Harvard, wrote a personal essay on Black farming that was shared widely on social media and even covered by NPR. An Agents of Change podcast features the views of fellows and invited guests, including a forthcoming episode with Columbia Mailman Professor Diana Hernandez, whose work focuses on communities of color in New York City.

Zota’s Columbia Mailman connections go further. Over the last two years, she has partnered with WeACT, a Harlem-based environmental justice group long affiliated with Columbia, on community-driven research and helped to educate their members about harmful environmental chemicals in the beauty industry. Andrea Baccarelli, chair of Environmental Health Sciences, is a collaborator; he is a co-investigator on her NIH grant focused on understanding epigenetic regulation of uterine fibroids, a gynecologic disorder that disproportionately impacts Black women. He also co-authored two papers on the links between phthalates and uterine fibroids. Last summer, Zota was one of the instructors in a Columbia Mailman/Harvard boot camp on environmental justice. 

“Columbia is a perfect fit,” she says. “My vision is to advance environmental justice and health equity through science, training the next generation, communication, and advocacy. I’m able to build on all of these at Mailman. So much is possible.”

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