You may have noticed there have been several changes here at Lipstick and Luxury over the past few months. I’ve posted a lot less and many of my posts feature a more natural approach to beauty. After a lot of thought and deliberation I decided to focus on natural, organic and cruelty-free brands. You see I’ve done a lot of research and read about the ingredients in some of my favorite beauty brands I was really shocked. Many personal care products that we all use daily, like lipstick, deodorant and sunscreen contain some very scary and harmful ingredients and the FDA is doing nothing about it. I touched upon this subject lightly in my post about lead in lipstick and why you should be concerned. But lead is not the only harmful item in our personal care products that we need to be worried about.
I came across this infographic that explains why exactly we should be concerned about what goes into our personal care products and for me this is the main reason I decided to focus on natural and organic products. The infographic notes, “We pay $50 billion every year to look and smell fantastic, but for those of you who thought beauty was only skin deep — well, you’re in for an ugly surprise.”
Created by: CosmetologySchool.org
Now I’ve also decided to focus on cruelty-free beauty products because I’m a vegetarian. And I think it’s a bit hypocritical of myself to not want to eat animals because I love them so much and at the same time support brands that cruelly test on the animals that I love. But I’ll save that for another post. 😉
The Environment Working Group (EWG) has a fabulous resource on their website called EWG’s Skin Deep® database where you can look up the ingredients listed on your favorite beauty products to find out exactly what’s in them and if any of the ingredients are hazardous. The cosmetics database contains over 69,000 beauty products and gives them a “Hazard Score” of 0-10. According to the website the rating tells us “the scope of ingredient safety data and the number of studies available in the open scientific literature.” Furthermore the site will tell us if the company tests on animals, if the brand has signed the Compaign for Safe Cosmetics and a full list of ingredients, which is very helpful so that you don’t have to strain your eyes trying to read the ingredient list on those tiny packages. I spent some time on this site and I was pretty shocked to find that many drugstore as well as luxury brands contained.Were you aware of the potential dangers in some of the cosmetics that you have been using?
I’m glad to hear you are focusing on healthy and cruelty-free cosmetics. That will be very helpful in making consumer choices. “Self-regulating” is one of the scariest terms in the English language! When I posted your piece on lead in lipstick on my Facebook page, a friend commented “FDA = men. Men don’t wear lipstick.”
It was a hard decision but based on the research that I’ve done it’s really the best choice. We will never know the long term effects of using harmful chemicals in personal care products so I don’t want to take any risks.
I love this post. I think finding safe natural cosmetic.beauty products is so difficult. I’m so overwhelmed when I go shopping. Especially finding products that work well/don’t stink or break me out. I look forward to reading about these on your blog 😀
Thank you Crissy! Healthy products are harder to find but they’re out there and I’m determined to dig them out!
Fantastic post! I have also been trying to make healthier choices over the last few months.