Clo.Chat: Towards a Sustainable and Natural Cosmetics Kit

Get a cup of coffee or tea or whatever it is that you prefer. Settle down and read on.... this one's a long post.

Today evening I lined up all the cosmetics/personal care products I own. Then I counted them all. The count? More than 60 products! Can you believe it? I sure as hell can't. I never thought I owned these many especially since I use about 10 of these regularly and maybe 10 more occasionally. That's about 20 products, which means I own about 40 more products I don't really use.

How did I end up with so many?

• Bought a bunch of products to try for hair/face to find "the one" (rendering the ones that are not, useless)
• Freebies/Samples (Who doesn't love free stuff?)
• Impulse purchases (Oooh, look that shade matches the dress I'm wearing tonight; ka-ching)
• Very old stuff still lurking around eating up space (For supposed future use; useless hope!)

I'm curious though, is it me or do you also find yourself surrounded by so much stuff you don't use!?

These are all the reasons I could come up with to make my cosmetics/personal care products kit more sustainable:

1. In this post, I found that my leading brand hair care product has high hazard toxins it. Applying that same calculation to the my entire collection means x50 the chemicals I'm inputting into my system!  
2. Cosmetics and personal care products have a shelf life and it is really not a good idea to use them beyond that period. Read more here.
3. I live in a 400sft apartment with my husband. I really don't have the luxury of space to keep the stuff I don't use.
4. I'm moving towards using only natural and vegan products; So cleaning up and getting rid of all the synthetic and chemical products means I can add natural products to my portfolio as needed.

Now all of this is nice and dandy. Here is my question: How to apply the three R's (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) to the cosmetics/personal care products? I've jotted down what I came up with below. I'd appreciate your ideas/suggestions/advice.

Step 1: Put a breaker on the buying for a while. Fix the current mess, then you can do some need-based shopping
Step 2: Reuse, reuse, reuse. I read somewhere that someone mixed blush to white paint to give it that faint pink color - some innovation huh!

• Use old shampoos and conditioners to clean up combs and brushes. Apparently, conditioner makes for a great shaving cream! More tips here
• Look at the number of nail polishes I own! I'm seriously planning to setup a Nail polish swap:  A group of friends get together, buy natural, chemical free polishes in different colors and exchange them! You get to try different colors and  it will cost less. Interested friends in NYC, ping me!
• Still trying to come up with good reuse for hair styling products (curl products) - Any ideas??

Step 3: Recycle the empty bottles. Many times you can recycle cosmetic packaging curbside but a lot of this packaging is made up of plastic#5 which is often left out of curbside recycling initiatives. Fret not, many companies have come up with cosmetic packing recycling initiatives such as Origins (accepts all types of packing irrespective of brand), Back to M.A.C (accepts only MAC products) etc.
Step 4: Buy Less!!!
Step 5: Buy natural and organic products. Safe for the body and the earth (couldn't resist the cliche)

In summary,

So I'm going to clean up my kit and will keep you posted on the updates.

...and now friend, if you have read through this entire post, I owe you a brownie to go with that coffee or tea or whatever that is that you are drinking.

Clo.Chat: Toxic Curls

Source: StoryofStuff.org

Yesterday I re-watched the video on The Story of Cosmetics with Annie Leonard. Elaborating on the 'Toxics In, Toxics Out' concept, Annie mentions that there are carcinogens and reproductive toxins in her leading brand shampoo. I was curious to check what toxins I was washing my hair with so took up this little exercise:

I made a list of ALL the listed ingredients from four of my heavily used hair care products. I then looked up each ingredient on the Environmental Working Group's Skin Deep website. This website was launched in 2004 to create online safety profiles for cosmetic and personal care products. Basically, they compare the ingredients on personal care product labels and websites to information in nearly 60 toxicity and regulatory databases. They then score each ingredient based on the health hazard and availability of data for that ingredient. Can you believe that there is no published data for some ingredients that goes into our cosmetics (scary!!!).

Anyhoo, below is snapshot of my little exercise:

Click to enlarge

What I found:

As you can see, all my hair care products have atleast one or two very high health hazard score (7-10) and a few moderate hazard ingredients (according to the Skin Deep website).  Read the names of the ones with "0" score; they are all natural extracts and water. Wonder why we can't have more zero-score ingredients in our products...

All in all, those reds and oranges and yellows in the chart above are all bad for me! my shampoo has a known carcinogen and a reproductive toxin. My conditioner has a very well documented human skin toxicant and my hair spray and styling lotion have a known human immune system and skin toxicant. This means that I'm inputting a lot of dangerous and unwanted toxins into my system. 

Time to listen to the elders and mum and start using shikakai :). And no, I'm not kidding. My mum had thicker, stronger and healthier hair at my age than I do now (she's got photographic evidence too). 

Shikakai is on my Indian grocery list now. I hope I can find the fruit itself and not the powder or paste.. In the mean time, if you want to find products that are safe, just go here and look them up or just look-up your product by brand or ingredient and see what's in your products.

For those who are interested in watching the Story of Cosmetics video, here it is: