The Conscious Living Project: Week One
Personal care product detox
It’s the start of 2018, and I’ve just turned 30. I’ve decided to commit the next year to examining and re-designing my life so that I live it more consciously.
What does that mean, exactly? I’m not sure yet. All I know is that I want to be more intentional about the way I treat the planet, my health, and other people. Even if it means making big shifts in my daily life. I’m taking a new step, every week, to uncovering what conscious living means for me. And I’d love to share my journey with you.
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Week one: Personal care product detox
I feel a little self-conscious starting here, because I realize that de-toxing your personal care regime is not the holy grail of conscious living. There are definitely deeper places to reach.
But for me, this felt like a good place to start.
I am a 30-year old woman living in the United States. My day begins and ends with beauty products. And before I was old enough to read a product label, I was sold a dream: buy this expensive, nicely package cream: it will make you beautiful; you’ll look younger longer. Also, it’s totally safe. Promise.
Meanwhile, I’ve had the slow, sneaking suspicion for a few years now that the innocuous lotions and soaps and shampoos and creams and serums and masks and etc. that I spend a ton of money on are probably full of lots of stuff I don’t actually want soaking into my pores.
On my mission to be more conscious, I’m trying really hard to resist falling into the trap of greenwashing (i.e, assuming I should buy something just because it’s marketed as organic or in healthy looking packaging). I’m also trying to resist jumping on the “all natural” bandwagon without a good amount of knowledge around why I’d choose NOT to buy chemical-laden products.
So I started with figuring out why the “unnatural stuff” might be pretty bad for me, and the planet, and my family. It didn’t take long to sell me on the concept. Here’s what I learned:
- What’s on the US cosmetics market is not regulated like you might think it is.
I’ve always assumed that surely the same regulating body that monitors the safety of stuff like food products and drugs would be monitoring the personal care products that make it on the shelf and eventually into our bodies. They don’t. “The law does not require cosmetic products and ingredients, other than color additives, to have FDA approval before they go on the market…” (FDA.gov). There are some very loose and vague laws that companies have to abide by when it comes to selling cosmetics, but ultimately: “companies and individuals who manufacture or market cosmetics have a legal responsibility to ensure the safety of their products” (also FDA.gov).
So this means that the people selling the products we buy are also the ones guaranteeing their safety. This feels like a huge conflict of interest to me.
There *is* a regulating body for the cosmetic industry called the “Cosmetic Ingredient Review.” Annie Leonard in Story of Stuff writes: “As it turns out, the CIR is funded and run by the cosmetics industry through its trade association, the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association. Their tests focus on immediate health effects like rashes and swelling. Unfortunately, they really need to rest for long-term effects, as well as what happens when different chemicals interact with one another and with genes.”
So the panel is funded by those with serious commercial interests — and they aren’t looking at this stuff with the long-term in mind.
Finally, I found this terrifying gem on Wikipedia: “As of 2013, the European Union bans nearly 1,400 chemicals from personal care products because they are carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction. In the United States, CIR has found only eleven chemicals to be “unsafe for use in cosmetics.”
Ok, so the safety net I thought was there — isn’t. What next?
2. “Fragrance” is not a harmless ingredient, and it’s in almost everything we buy.
A key risk in our personal care products seems to be the presence of phthalates, which (according to CDC.gov) are: “chemicals used to make plastics more flexible and harder to break. They are often called plasticizers. Some phthalates are used as solvents (dissolving agents) for other materials. They are used in hundreds of products, such as vinyl flooring, adhesives, detergents, lubricating oils, automotive plastics, plastic clothes (raincoats), and personal-care products (soaps, shampoos, hair sprays, and nail polishes).”
Where are these phthalates hiding? Under the vague ingredient listed as “fragrance.” Companies are legally protected from disclosing their trademark fragrance recipes, so this is where these bad chemicals sneak in.
What do they do to us? “Human health effects from exposure to low levels of phthalates are unknown. Some types of phthalates have affected the reproductive system of laboratory animals. More research is needed to assess the human health effects of exposure to phthalates” (also CDC.gov).
This paragraph reeks of bullshit to me. It seems like a no brainer that if phthalates affect the reproductive systems of animals, they affect the reproductive systems of humans. We’re not that different. Surely the only reason we don’t have more data on how they affect humans is because we don’t test products on humans.
Even more alarming, apparently phthalates shrink the size of men’s testicals. Gah! (You can read the white paper on this here).
Ok, I’m sold. I’m done with phthalates. Which means I have to be done with most mainstream beauty products, because most of them contain undefined fragrance. I’m looking at you, Bath & Body Works…
There are plenty of other chemicals in our mainstream cosmetics (easy to see when you look at an ingredient list), some of them also harmful, some of them probably not so harmful, but the important thing to understand is that there’s not really anyone watching your back here. I can’t see a team of really smart, conscientious, unbiased humans testing the long-term effects of chemicals in lotions and body spray in this equation.
This knowledge, alongside the devastating observation that more and more (often very young) people seem to be getting seriously sick with cancer and autoimmune diseases every single year that passes me by: that’s it. I’m done. No more chemicals in the products I choose to put on my body.
So next up was doing a total overhaul of my personal care products, and figuring out what to use instead. Here’s how I approached it:
Step One: Pull It All Out
I started with a complete audit of my bathroom. I pulled everything out that might remotely be defined a beauty product and put it on the kitchen table. Here’s what my stash looked like:
Step Two: Technology to the Rescue!
I download this app: “Think Dirty.”
Think Dirty is awesome. It’s modern, uber usable, and beautifully designed. If you’ve been burned by similar apps before, give this one a shot. This is the first of its kind that I’ve tried and loved.
Step Three: Scannin’ time
I scanned everything on the table, item by item.
Some scans failed: they don’t have the item in the database yet. No problem. I put that one aside in a pile and manually searched for it later. (Suspiciously, not a single Bath and Body Works item pulled up for me, via scan… coincidence?)
A lot of scans worked, especially for the more popular name brand things: the specific product would pull up, with a rating of 0–10, 10 being most harmful.
Fun fact: Cetaphil, the “gentle cleanser” that every single dermatologist I’ve ever seen has always recommended to me, is rated a 10/10 for harmfulness.
I navigated to the “Ingredients” tab to see why:
- Butylparaben: toxic to reproduction, carcinogen. Mimics estrogen and can act as a potential hormone causing systemic disruptor. (Thanks CIR!)
- Methylparaben: some studies of breast tumors show a build up of methylparabens in the breast tissue.
Cool.
I set my standard at 3 — that’s the highest I’d go. I threw everything that ranked 4 or higher into a bag. Here is the picture of all the products that passed my “3 or lower” test:
Most surprising:
I was pretty disappointed to see that my Dove bodywash had a rating of 9/10, mostly due to undefined “parfum” but also phenoxyethanol: “the ninth most prevalent allergen in patch tests. The FDA has warned that the chemical is potentially toxic to infants via ingestion, and can depress the central nervous system and may cause vomiting and diarrhea. German research in 1999 concluded that it had neurotoxic potential.”
And the “F-U” award goes to…
Bath & Body Works.
This brand has a strong emotional trigger for me. I grew up surrounded by B&BW. My mom LOVES this stuff and for good reason, it smells and feels lovely. Their branding team is on fire. At any given time, she has no fewer than 3 bottles of bubble bath, ~2 bottles of shower gel, and 2 or 3 body lotions near her bathtub. Not to mention candles, room scents, car scents, hand sanitizers — and of course, a bottle of B&BW hand soap punctuating every single sink in the house.
Do a quick search for Bath & Body Works in Think Dirty and you’ll see it: 9/10, 10/10, *maybe* a 7/10 if the product is particularly unoffensive.
From what I can tell, this isn’t just an added fragrance issue (anything with an added fragrance has a huge spike in rating on this app). A lot of their products contain:
Diazolidinyl Urea: shown to release formaldehyde — a carcinogen.
I love the smell of “Vanilla Cashmere” as much as the next person, but I don’t want formaldehyde infused into my pores. And I sure as hell don’t want it infused in my sweet mom’s! Ugh.
Step Four: Banishment
After my Think Dirty audit, I banished everything I didn’t want to use anymore into a bag that now sits in my closet. For most of us, it’s not practical to buy everything we might need in our personal care routine in one day. It’s totally ok to rebuild over time, I think — as long as we actually rebuild.
I‘ve found that the added barrier of having to go into my closet to get anything out of a paper bag keeps me from reaching for it automatically. Slowly but surely, I’m working to find products that meet my criteria, at which I’ll eventually dispose of this bag, but for now, they are banished in the closet. **Before throwing anything away, make sure to read my note at the end on disposal.**
Step Five: Rebuilding
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life stressing about which products I buy. I made the decision to do a good amount of research upfront, select a handful of brands and products that met my new standards, and then just buy and use them on autopilot with the prediction that if I found a good product I liked, I could use it forever (until a better one came along?) and drastically simplify my life. And hopefully, infuse a little more consciousness into my daily routine.
I started by establishing my core criteria for what beauty products I’d be willing to support and use on my body:
- No chemicals / all natural ingredients.
- No animal testing.
- Vegan ingredients only.
- Recycled packaging.
- Recyclable packaging.
- Made in the US. (not because I am particularly patriotic, but because I want to reduce the amount of energy and resources it takes to bring my product to the US where I purchase and use it).
- Reasonable in price and accessible for purchasing often.
Then, I started googling. I’ll admit: I did not do an exhaustive search — so there are probably a handful of other great options — but I did settle on a few awesome brands that I’ve loved using so far.
This is my new go-to for anything that isn’t makeup: face wash, body wash, shampoo + conditioner, facial scrub, and even dry shampoo. It’s AMAZING. And I am in no way benefiting from singing their praises, I promise.
If you try one thing of theirs, try their brightening scrub. Game changer.
Google + Amazon led me to them, but I was later pleasantly surprised to see that their stuff is also stocked at Whole Foods. I was impressed to hear back from them via email pretty quickly confirming that their packaging is recycled and recyclable.
I got lucky and was able to try a bunch of stuff at once while they were offering 40% off on Black Friday, but even full price, their stuff is super reasonable: only $9.99 for a full sized bottle of face wash.
I am in love with this toothpaste. I am admittedly a sucker for design, and their branding is beautiful.
But, more importantly I love their story: “In 2011, Davids founder, Eric David Buss, began looking into the ingredients being used in the “natural” toothpaste he was using, and found that many of the ingredients were unhealthy. After looking for a better alternative, and not happy with what was available, a “simple” idea of creating his own toothpaste was formed. This initial idea turned into a four year obsession to develop the very best natural toothpaste possible, thus Davids was born.”
Tom’s used to be my go-to (not due to thoughtful research, but rather their very effective marketing), but I was pretty disillusioned to find out the brand is now owned by Colgate-Palmolive.
I haven’t made my way through everything yet (I’m still rebuilding my cosmetic collection piece by piece as I use things), but I have loved trying Pacifica’s makeup line so far. I’m using their Alight Multi-Mineral BB Cream, Transcendent Correcting Concealer, and Tahitian Gardenia Perfume. I found these by literally just scanning things I liked at Whole Foods on Think Dirty and doing some quick research to validate they passed my criteria.
Brook, their founder, is also adorable and you can read more about her and her husband’s company story here. The only open question I had was whether or not their products were made from recycled packaging, but finding this article allayed my concerns.
Note: they do have a few products that pull up as 4s and 5s, like their mascara for example, which is cited for crosspolymer (whatever that is). I’ll probably pass on that and keep searching. Stay tuned.
Disposal
I haven’t made this step yet, but I’ve started researching how I’ll go about getting rid of my banished items.
Good to know: Don’t pour them down the drain. This was a surprise to me, too. Beauty-hero.com says:
“As you begin making the switch to non-toxic beauty products and do a cabinet detox, you’re likely to wind up with plenty of containers filled with remnants of carcinogenic and hormone disrupting ingredients. While your first instinct may be to rinse out and recycle these product-lined bottles, jars and tubes, doing so sends these toxic chemicals right into our surface water (as does using them on a daily basis, but thank goodness you’re done with that). We know that contaminating water is not what you had in mind so here are some better ways to dispose of beauty products, their containers and their contents as safely as possible.”
It’s not a simple step, but the best guidance I could find is to bring all of my old products to my local hazardous waste center. I live in Austin, TX, and found through our .gov site that they accept household chemicals / products for free, and just ask I bring them over in their original containers.
Once I work my way through rebuilding my personal care collection, I’ll take the box to the drop-off center and never purchase something questionable again.
In summary:
Our self-care rituals should be sacred. The creams and serums we massage into our skin should be 100% free of questionable chemicals. These things don’t belong in our drawers, our environment, or our pores.
What’s next
This was admittedly a baby step. The more I’m learning about this stuff, the more I realize that these problems need to be solved at a macro level — not micro. But, it’s a start.
Next, I plan to research ways I can get involved in how we regulate the personal care industry: packaging, chemicals, and testing. How can I support organizations that are tackling these scary problems? Which politicians should I vote for that will care about this, and take action? Are there bills I can lobby for that will make an impact?
Stay tuned. Thanks for reading!
