CLEAN BEAUTY
Clean Beauty Care
Many personal care products are found to have “endocrine disrupting chemicals”. These chemicals are often used in order to preserve or create products that are more shelf stable. Unfortunately, they can impact our hormonal system in a variety of ways.
Some of these compounds can mimic the structure of our natural occurring hormones - like estrogen, thyroid hormones and testosterone. This can potentially lead to an overstimulation which can have impacts on our reproductive health, metabolism and mood.
Our skin is porous, so when we use personal care products (soaps, lotions, shampoos, make up, nail polish etc,) we may absorb some degree of these products.
There are a few easy switches and things we can be mindful of when picking personal care products to strike the balance of reducing exposure to chemicals, but still having products that work for us.
There is a long list of specific chemicals to avoid, but we prefer using apps such as thinkdirty and EWG skin deep to scan and search products. An easy one to remember to try and avoid is “fragrance” or “parfum” - this labelling allows companies to not disclose what is in the fragrance because of protecting intellectual properties.
In addition, here are a few products we have tried and like for clean personal care products (that work!)
Shampoo & Conditioners
Attitude - you can find these at rexall or shoppers drug mart sometimes!
Carina Organics - at health food store, comparable price to Attitude
Honest Company -
Skin Care
Skin Essence Organics - nice cleansers and oil based moisturizers. They are also locally made in Toronto!
The Ordinary - has nice affordable options for face moisturizers (for single ingredient, cold-pressed oils)
Detox Market
They carry many different makeup brands that focus on clean beauty. Depending on what you use you can explore a variety of lipsticks, mascaras and foundations. (They even do monthly subscription boxes that send you some of their tried and true products! - a nice idea for a gift!)
Deodorants
Natural deodorants can be a challenging switch to make - especially since most options geared towards women are antiperspirants, meaning that they block sweating. For natural deodorants, the best advice is to try switching over during colder seasons, keeping on on hand at work or in your purse (you simply have to reapply more frequently) and understand you will sweat and that’s a healthy bodily function! This might be an adjustment especially moving off antiperspirants.
A few of our favourite brands are:
Sudsatorium - a Toronto based company!
Schmidt’s
Native