The data that were selected for this assignment came from Data.gov and was provided to the California Safe Cosmetics Program (CSCP) in the California Department of Public Health (found via:https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/chemicals-in-cosmetics-2a971). The main variables within the data were categorical in nature, including the product names, brand names, and the category (i.e., type) of product. The data also includes the date a chemical was reported to be present within that product, what the chemical was, and the date the product was discontinued. The original data contains 114635 observations across 22 different variables, the following explorations were initially focused on how evaluating proportions of chemicals identified within the top 10 reported cosmetics and the top 10 companies reported. In addition, there was also an exploration of how these reports change over time. More specifically, it was desired to see the difference between when reports were submitted initially versus most recent reports submitted. The variety of graphs below help to visualize the frequency of the chemicals reported in cosmetics across categories and company name, while also displaying the frequency of those reports across time.

The original draft of this assignment is displayed below and contains information that allows for the visualization of the relationship between the proportion of chemicals reported to the CSCP, the primary categories of cosmetic reported, and the company that owns the product.

While the exploration of the categorical data is interesting, the main feedback received was that it would be even more intriguing to see something outside of a bar graph. To address this feedback, two frequency polygons were created to display the change of chemicals reported by company over time. While it was anticipated to see a clear decrease in the number of reports over time from the initial reports to recent reports, the graphs below display quite the opposite. In some cases, the number of reports did not change much across time (e.g., Victoria’s Secret Beauty) or had wild variability across time and report time (e.g., Bare Escentuals Beauty, Inc.).