Get your green on
Welcome to my first installment of the Monday lunch blog. More on this later…
Last week my other half asked me why I’ve suddenly become so interested in natural and organic cosmetics. I had just come home with Burt’s Bees shampoo and conditioner, a mineral salt deodorant and some natural creams and lotions. Looking up some ingredients on Skin Deep: Cosmetic Safety Database, I discovered some unfavourable and increasingly risky items in two of my new purchases and started to complain. It was difficult to express, to begin with, why I was choosing the most toxic-free products I could get my hands on. Besides the obvious health and environmental impacts, I can’t bear knowing I’m using something bad for me, especially if I just spent $10 on it. Let’s face it, it’s not cheap.
So why am I, shall we say, obsessed now? I think it’s partly my discovery of Adria Vasil’s Ecoholic, a wonderfully-designed guide to safe products and services in Canada. At 345 pages, it’s not a quick read from front to back, but it acts easily as a reference. Organized into comprehensive sections and accompanied by a detailed index and a resource guide, Ecoholic can be opened anywhere and understood. It was published this year, so you can bet all the links to websites are current. (Vasil recommends the Skin Deep database, for example.)
The other inspiration was the Skin Deep database. My mother showed it to me recently, and I discovered just how toxic my products are. My Skintimate raspberry shaving lotion, for example, has ingredients that cause cancer. Several ingredients (dyes, preservatives, etc.) are also on my chemical/food sensitivities list. It literally went in the trash the next day. (Oh I hate making garbage!) I didn’t need it to point out what Vasil’s book already showed me: my so-called natural Down Under Natural’s shampoo is chock full of nasty ingredients. I’m now debating how best to get rid of it. The site’s offerings got me excited about the possibilities that lay ahead of me, including natural nail polish, at last! (Yes, Marianna, (regular) nail polish IS bad for you, despite what the doctor in your family may have insisted.)
So with this new information in mind, I’m trading in my chemicals for safe cosmetics.* Welcome to a world of feeling good and doing good, too.
* Bear in mind that not everything natural is good for you, and not everything synthetic is bad for you. Be sure to look it up.