Victoria St. Martin
Health and Environmental Justice Reporter
Health and Environmental Justice Reporter
Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. During a 20-year career in journalism, she has worked in a half-dozen newsrooms, including The Washington Post, where she served as a breaking news and general assignment reporter. Besides The Post, St. Martin has also worked at The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, The Trentonian, The South Bend Tribune and WNIT, the PBS-member station serving north central Indiana. In addition to her newsroom experience, St. Martin also is a journalism educator who spent four years as a distinguished visiting journalist with the Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics, and Democracy at the University of Notre Dame. She currently teaches at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University. St. Martin is a graduate of Rutgers University and holds a master’s degree from American University’s School of Communication. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2011 and has written extensively about the prevalence of breast cancer in young women. In her work, St. Martin is particularly interested in health care disparities affecting Black women. Her project for the 2023 National Fellowship explores how lax regulation of the cosmetics industry harms Black Americans.
A three-part series sheds light on a new set of sweeping federal consumer protection powers — and the public health challenges created by the loopholes that remain.
The effort by Heather McTeer Toney, a former EPA official, is a part of a larger campaign to educate communities of color about personal and communal environmental harms.
The Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act empowers the FDA to recall harmful cosmetics. Advocates want to know why manufacturers still don’t have to prove their products are safe before selling.
The FDA has finally proposed a ban on formaldehyde in hair straighteners, and new regulations on the cosmetics industry take effect next month. But one activist called them “a floor, not a ceiling.
The Columbia researcher has been documenting how racialized beauty norms compel women of color to disproportionately use cosmetics — and face a higher threat from potentially harmful chemicals.
A reporter asks why cosmetics in the U.S. are loaded with chemicals banned in other countries — and whether toxic exposures caused her breast cancer.