FSB Author Article
How to Tell if Your Beauty Products are Actually
Natural
By Adria Vasil,
Author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the
Most
Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services
Truth is, the beauty industry is a bit of a wild west with no sheriff in sight. Anyone can call a product natural even if a tube of lipstick is 100% synthetic. That means lotions and potions packaged with pretty green leaves on the front and the word "nature" or "herbal" in their name can and, unfortunately, often do contribute to your daily chemical bath. The average woman slathers over 125 chemicals onto her scalp, body, face and lips each day (next time you're getting ready in the morning scan ingredient lists and do your own count!). Wouldn't be such a big deal if they were all cleared by health officials, but only 11% of the 10,500 chemical ingredients that go into making personal care products are actually tested for safety.
Here are some quick tips for picking out the greenest
goods for your body.
- Put on your reading glasses: Start flipping products over and reading those tiny ingredient lists. Making sense of what's on there shouldn't feel like you're trying to decode Sanskrit! Reach for beauty products with pronounceable ingredients (you can generally spot chemical names pretty easily though some natural ingredients might be written in Latin).
- Crack the certified organic code: Not all organic products are created equal. You’ll find the USDA organic seal on goods that are at least 95% certified organic (the purest of the pure). If a product is 70-94% organic it will say "made with organic ingredients." And the rest? Well, keep in mind that plenty of beauty blends advertise two or three certified organic ingredients while the rest of their contents are totally synthetic.
- Look for the Natural Seal of approval: The Natural Products Association recently kicked off a new certification system for beauty products that are at least 95% natural. The seal doesn't signal the ingredients are in any way organic (i.e. farmed without pesticides), but it does tell you that a lip balm, eye shadow or foot cream is largely plant- or mineral-based.
- Know your Score: Punch
any product name into Environmental Working Group's ranking of tens of
thousands of personal care products and you'll see just how it
ranks
on the group's safety scale (www.cosmeticsdatabase.com).
These guys cover everything from mascara to your man's after shave and
cross check the ingredients against toxicity databases. At the click of
a mouse, you'll get a good sense of which beauty concoctions are truly
clean and green so you can start lathering up peacefully.
©2009 Adria
Vasil, author of Ecoholic:
Your Guide to the
Most
Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services
Author Bio
Adria Vasil, author of Ecoholic: Your Guide to the
Most
Environmentally Friendly Information, Products & Services,
is a best-selling author and journalist for Canada's NOW, where
she has been
writing the "Ecoholic" column for
five years. She lives in Toronto.
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