The Honest Company, Jessica Alba's popular home and personal care business, is under fire again. The billion dollar company is being alleged of using a harmful chemical and falsely presenting the product.
The company is being hit with a proposed class-action lawsuit that alleges the company to have "deceptively marketed" its cleaning products, which include dish soap and laundry detergents. According to WBT, the lawsuit also alleges the company to have falsely advertised the products as "honestly free" of sodium laurel sulfate (SLS), an ingredient that the lawsuit claims to "cause health problems for some."
Alba released a statement about the claims being "baseless and without merit."
"The Honest Company takes its responsibility to our consumers seriously and strongly stands behind our products," the statement reads. "These allegations are without merit."
On Mar. 10, Wall Street Journal published its investigations which included two independent lab test that found SLS in The Honest Company's laundry detergent, a chemical in which the company promised never to use.
The Honest Company called the newspaper "reckless," at the time of the investigation.
In a statement provided by the company to ABC News, "The Wall Street Journal has been reckless in the preparation of this article, refused multiple requests to share data on which they apparently relied and has substituted junk science for credible journalism."
The Wall Street Journal said on their following reports that while Honest laundry detergent bottles note that the product does not contain SLS, the company that produces the Honest detergent removed that claim from its website last year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said exposure to SLS may cause cough or sore throat if inhaled; nausea, vomiting or diarrhea if ingested; and redness if exposed to skin or eyes.
CDC said, "repeated or prolonged contact with skin may cause dermatitis," or skin inflammation.
ABC News' Chief Health and Medical Editor, Dr. Richard Besser, said on "Good Morning America" that SLS is safe when used correctly, based on the findings of his research.
"The Food and Drug Administration has evaluated it for food and as long as it's at the right concentration, it's safe," Besser said.
"For a lot of chemicals, it's not whether at high doses it's a problem, it's whether at the level that it's supposed to be used at it causes problems," he added. "That doesn't mean that some people won't have skin sensitivity and, if you have that, then you want to avoid those products."
Besser advised consumers to check with their doctors for queries about specific chemicals in products
"If you see these rumors on the Internet, you want to print them out," he said. "If there's any chemicals listed on a product that you're concerned about, print them out and take them into your doctor."
According the Daily Mail, Alba founded Honest Company in 2012. It initially introduced 17 products, which has now expanded to 120 and are available in 4,000 retail stores in the United States and Canada.
In September, Alba's company faced a $5 million lawsuit from a user who claimed that their products were not effective and contained harmful chemicals.
