3 Steps to Detox Your Personal Products [FREE PRINTABLE]
If you are concerned about the harmful chemicals in your skincare products, cosmetics and personal products, you need to check out today's post. Affiliate links are included in this post as well as a free printable.
We all know that the products we use every day in our homes and on our bodies are made up of complex fomulas, created in a lab somewhere.
Many of the products we use today have been around for decades and so we assume they are safe.
However there are tons of products available in the United States that include chemicals and ingredients that are banned in other countries around the world.
Each one has a different reason, and many are not well known or fully reported on in the news.
The real kicker is that even if you know the name of a chemical you want to avoid, you might not even know that it is parading under a different name!
Take formaldehyde. It is known carcinogen that is also linked to asthma, neurotoxicity, and developmental toxicity.
We've all heard of it and we all know we don't want anything to do with it, right?! But it is still regularly used as a preservative in many shampoos, body washes and bubble baths.
It's present whereever quaternium-15, DMDM hydantoin, imidazolidinyl urea, diazolidinyl urea, sodium hydroxymethylglycinate, 2-bromo-2-nitropropane-1,3 diol (Bronopol), and several other preservatives are listed.
WHAT?! Yikes!
What you may not know is that there is an easy way to find out exactly how safe your personal products are.Â
There is a really amazing organization called Environmental Work Group who tirelessly researches and reports on consumer products so that we can be informed and make our own decisions.
On the EWG's website they have an incredibly handy tool called the Skin Deep Database. They break down the ingredients in skin care products, cosmetics, sunscreen and more. Each product is given a rating to help you quickly judge how safe each of your products is.
In addition to rating products, they also give ratings to the individual ingredients so you can search for those too.
So let's put that awesome database to work and get rid of those harmful chemicals!
3 Step Detox Plan
If you're ready to get cleaner, safer products, just follow this process and keep your Cheat Sheet handy any time you run out of a product.
First thing's first: Grab your free Detox Cheat Sheet, by signing up below and get on the Good List:
1. Write down all the product names for anything you currently use in the Current column.
2. Head over to the Skin Deep Database and search for each one, recording the rating in the Ratings column, where it points to the current product.
3. Once you've looked up all of your products you can circle any that you feel you want to replace and go one by one to find a replacement. Need some help with that? I got you covered!
Where to Find Safer Skin Care and Personal Products
For years my family has been piecing together safer products from various brands, with a constant trial an error process.
Honestly it was tiresome to have to research a brand every single time we need to replace one. Usually if we found a product we liked, we would go and try another product from the same company only to find it had a worse rating or we didn't care for the quality.
That is when I found out that the EWG, who created the Skin Deep database, recently created a category called EWG Verified. It's basically a safety Green Light to let you know that any product from any EWG Verified company fulfills three criteria:
-Be free of EWG's ingredients of concern
-Fully disclose all ingredients
-Follow good manufacturing practices
In researching these companies, so far we found that the quality still varies widely from product to product but we have found one where every single product so far has been a home run.
Beautycounter is the name of the company. It may sound like it is mainly cosmetics but they have products for men, women, kids and baby. It's basically a department store quality brand, but without all the harmful ingredients.
Like Whole Foods Meets MAC.
Their baby products are my favorite go-to baby shower gift.
Our whole family uses their bath products and this summer we will be all about their sunscreen.
We have systematically switched over to Beautcounter and it's been so nice not to have to go back to the drawing board every time we need something. I hope this helps you make the switch to safer skincare and clean beauty products!
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