I could hear the $$ signs cha-chinging in my husbands head every time I went through one of my "Do you know how bad this stuff is for you" sprees of cleaning out my bathroom closet. He could see it all adding up as I threw out every last bottle of shampoo, conditioner, face wash, lotion, toothpaste, detergent, or a cleaning product. And it added up to even more each time I came home with a new "all-natural" product to try. I felt his pain. It was not only invigorating turning over a new leaf but incredibly frustrating.No matter how much research I did, I didn't know what to do with the new information I had learned about what is really in the everyday products we use and how they affect our health. I just wanted someone to tell me what was safe and what to buy. C'mon, can't you make it easy for me?
It all came to be when a friend of a friend made a comment one time while at our apartment about the Bath and Body Works lotion I had in my bathroom. "Don't you know how bad for you that stuff is?" "Well, no. Not really. Brown Sugar and Fig smells pretty delicious to me!" Ugh. And off went my curiosity light. That night I started researching the dangers of personal care products. It might have started with a Google search something like this: How bad for you is Pantene Pro-V? And there it began.
Somehow I stumbled upon Skin Deep., The Environmental Working Group's Safe Cosmetics Database. It is a great website where you can search for a product and it will give you a rating from 1-10 (10 being the most toxic) of the ingredients listed. This is where I discovered things like Endocrine Disruptors and Neurotoxicity. And ingredients like Pthalates , Parabens , Formaldehyde , 1,4-Dioxane, to name a few. What the heck are these and what are they doing in my personal care products?!?!? Needless to say at the end of it I felt like maybe ignorance was bliss. Now I had too much information. I felt a nagging feeling of distrust in every bodycare product lined up in my bathroom.
And there went all of the beauty products that I loved and used daily. None of them were considered "safe". Keep in mind that even those "natural" products weren't even that safe. Nothing says irresponsible marketing like : Organix, Aveeno Active Naturals, Pantene Nature Fusion...you get where I'm going here. Take a look at the ingredients. There's nothing "natural" or "from nature" about synethetic fragrances, formaldehyde, preservatives, pthalates or parabens. But yet those ingredients are widely used in such products and the average consumer is none the wiser.
Total headache.
So this is where the idea of my blog all started from. I have a lot of girlfriends reaching out to me to ask what this "all-natural" thing is all about because they themselves are starting to realize how important it is to eliminate environmental toxins from their everyday lives. But lets be honest here. I'm not a writer and frankly my grammar isn't always the best. So don't expect me to include footnotes or for my posts to always be backed by scientific data publications. I'm just hoping to put out there what I know, start a dialogue within your own household, and to recommend any articles I'm interested in that "puts it out there". I will also include products that I have found to work over the years. Because who wants to sacrifice beauty just for health?? I mean we are all vain in some way and sometimes "all-natural" can mean total crap.
So ladies (and maybe even a few dudes stumbling upon here) check out a few of these websites and begin your own journey! ( Please keep in mind I highly recommend starting this adventure before you begin starting a family. Mine began a few years ago and I'm glad it did. I feel confident that I laid the groundwork early on for a safer environment for my family.)
The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics : http://safecosmetics.org/
Environmental Working Group: http://www.ewg.org/
EWG Skin Deep : http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/
Healthy Child, Healthy World : http://healthychild.org/
Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families: http://www.saferchemicals.org/
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