Add These Nontoxic Beauty Tips to Your Daily Routine
Beauty products are everywhere and they help us get ready to meet the world as moms, entrepreneurs, or even as teens and tweens! We all use these products as part of our daily routines, from our morning makeup application to our wind-down evening rituals.
What if our favorite beauty products can be something we look forward to using every day as a form of self-care? They can be by incorporating these nontoxic beauty tips into your routine!
Before we look at some nontoxic beauty tips you can start adding to your daily routine today, let’s talk about the difference between “green beauty” and “clean beauty.” Green beauty is focused more on sustainability, while clean beauty is focused on human health.
Sometimes, these terms align with one another, and they do both, but more often than not clean beauty products are harder to find. And greenwashing often misconstrues what we as consumers think of as safe, which can make it even more challenging to know what brands to trust. But we’ve got you covered with some nontoxic beauty brands to try!
Here are 3 nontoxic beauty tips and beauty brands we recommend that can help reduce your exposure to things like neurotoxins, carcinogens, and EDCs:
1) Use Lead-free Lipstick & Lip products
Did you know that there could be lead in your favorite lipstick and lip products? Lead is actually a heavy metal and a neurotoxin that can damage the nervous system and lead to poor health effects AND it’s still found in many common beauty products today. There is no safe level of lead, and while we wish we could say it was better regulated, the beauty industry is not set up to protect us from these toxicants. Luckily, there are brands standing up for human health that are lead-free that we recommend trying—RMS Beauty and Henne. Brands like these are free from formaldehyde and other heavy metals, so your body will thank you for using them!
The more we know about what we’re consuming, the more we can create change. By using clean beauty products we can reduce exposure to chemicals and heavy metals on our skin, which is our largest organ and absorbs so much of what we apply. We want to be mindful and take care of our health, and this is especially important for teens and tweens who are still growing!
2) Try PPD-free Hair Color & Hair Dye
Have you ever had a reaction to using hair color and wondered what ingredients you might be sensitive to? On average, 70% of women color their hair and yet it’s hard to know what chemicals are lurking in our salon or box dye. The main ingredient that many have concerns with or react to is called PPD (p-phenylenediamine). It is known to act as an EDC (endocrine disrupting chemical), carcinogen, and mutagen (damages DNA).
So if you are shopping for PPD-free hair color look closely at the ingredient list because many products will say they’re PPD-free when they’re not. Luckily, Madison Reed’s hair color is PPD-free, and even though it still has chemicals that are not clean, it’s a good option if you’re trying to avoid PPD. When looking at ingredients, the lower PPD is on the list, the less there is in the product. You can also consider taking a color break to let your natural hair color show!
3) Look into Nontoxic Perfumes & Fragrance
There are some trailblazing brands in the fragrance space beginning to offer safer perfume!
Here are two paths to consider for nontoxic fragrance—1) find clean essential oils or 2) find transparent nontoxic fragrance brands that share their ingredient lists.
The DIY essential oil route takes a bit of learning as you may want to be informed about the quality, synthetics used, and extraction methods. You also want to follow the proper dilution for applications and be aware of how they may affect children and pets.
In the nontoxic fragrance industry there are a few brands that avoid many of the more than 300 chemicals used in fragrance, which include formaldehyde and phthalates. Some of these brands that we recommend are State of Change, Heretic, and Henry Rose. Outside of using these brands, know that you can always peruse EWG to find safer products, rated ingredients, as well as the human health impacts of those ingredients.
Remember—we are all deserving of safe, clean, and nontoxic beauty products.
By switching even just one product at a time, you’re doing your part, and you’re making an investment in health, becoming part of the larger movement to get safer products into our homes.
Want to do even more? Think about gifting new beauty items to your loved ones or adding them to a wishlist to look forward to! Small changes matter, and you and your health are worth it.
