A few months back I was introduced to the Environmental Working Group's website through a clip 10 Americans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5n4HhQr25Q). It's a great clip about how they looked at ten Americans and their toxic load.
EWG is designed to inform and protect the general public and the environment. It's an American group, but I think people world wide can benefit from what they are doing!
My favourite thing on their web site is the Skin Deep data base. In their own words, this is what it is, “EWG's Skin Deep is an online safety guide for cosmetics and personal care products, launched in 2004 to help people find safer products, with fewer ingredients that are hazardous or that haven't been thoroughly tested. Skin Deep combines product ingredient lists with information in more than 50 standard toxicity and regulatory databases. The database provides easy-to-navigate safety ratings for tens of thousands of personal care products.”
According to me : a handy-dandy tool that you can look up just about any product you use on your skin, in your mouth (that isn't food), or for any cosmetic purpose and see what it can and does do to your body.
It was extremely helpful in picking out a safe sun screen for our family, as well as letting me know what different chemicals in my different beauty products have been shown to do to the human body.
While it can be helpful, it can also be a harbinger of doom! So many of the products on the store shelves have pretty scary things in them. We've all heard the controversy over formaldehyde in hair products and things like that. It can scare the pants off you, if you read about every single chemical in every single product that you use on a daily basis. Please be careful in looking everything up. It is my tendency to be over exuberant in ousting different products, but then regretting them later.
If you do choose to get rid of different products, I would suggest (as did my husband) to take it one at a time!
A couple of things before I give you the website:
make sure you type in the correct spelling of your product! It doesn't do a close to match
check the ingredients list against your bottle of whatever, sometimes they miss an ingredient or two
if you can't find your product, you can type in ingredients one at a time to get an idea of how safe things are
check out the safety of each component of whats in the products, don't just go by the rating. You could have an 8 or a 9 in a product and have everything else be a 0 and then have the rating be a 1...or you could have everything in the product be a 2 and get a 4 or 5 rating.
Here it is : http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/
Have fun with it – remember, the goal is to lessen the load, not necessarily eliminate it!
XO,
Bliss
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