Could you eat your moisturizer?

It seems like a bizarre question, but I have been asking myself a lot of those types of questions lately. I have been reading a book by Rick Smith (from Environmental Defense in Canada) and Bruce Lourie called Slow Death by Rubber Duck. If you think it sounds morbid, it kind of is. Everyone should read it - and then take a hard look at the products that you use everyday.

You see, as women, we have a tendency to use cosmetic and body care products to make us look and feel better. Each day, unbeknowst to most, we put hundreds of chemicals on our bodies, that are extremely harmful to the environment, and our health.

Check out this website: http://www.toxicnation.ca/ to see some of the chemicals that we are exposed to every day.

So, why am I bringing this up? I had an Ah-Ha moment. And epiphany of sorts. I counted my beauty products. I used over a dozen before I even got to my coffee - shampoo, conditioner, cleanser, body wash, shaving cream, hair straightening gel, moisturizer, foundation, concealer, blush, eye shadow, mascara, hand cream, lipstick. Yah, and that's a normal day. Think about all of the extra stuff we use on 'special occasions'.

I used this website: http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/ to take stock of how bad my products really were. And mind you, I don't by cheap stuff either - I always thought that buy purchasing the best I could afford, then I would keep my skin healthy for a long time. Boy, was I wrong. And not only was I harming my body, I was flushing these products into the wastewater system!

Many of my products were ranked in the highly toxic categories - very scary! And of course, the better the smelling, the worse they were. Most contained some form of phthalates (pronounced thal-late), in the form of fragrance/parfum, sodium lauryl sulfates, urea, parabens, and triclosan. I couldn't believe that I was actually putting this stuff on my body.

So, I bagged up all of my harmful products (I kept a few that were on the low end of the scale to finish up), and carried them out to the solid waste commission's Household Hazardous Waste depot. Three big reuseable bags in total. The guys at the depot looked at me kind of funny, but as I was driving home, I felt so much better knowing that I had taken the first step to ridding my life of harmful toxins - at least those I could control.

And now onto the next step....finding new - more environmentally friendly - and healthy products!

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Easy Environmentalism