Skin Deep

Lately I have come to know (and know of) more and more young women with breast cancer. I started reading the blog of a young Vancouverite woman and just last week the best friend of one of my internet friends died of inflammatory breast cancer at the age of 30. I have always known that there are nasty chemicals in our skin-care products but something made me actually start researching this last week.

We switched all our soaps a few months ago and half of the new products sucked ass. The bad ones were made by Seventh Generation and they failed to get anything clean - specifically the dishwasher liquid and the laundry soap. We switched to the President’s Choice Green brand from Superstore and are really happy with them. They come in a super concentrated form so there is less packaging and as an added bonus they actually clean the things they say they will. The dish soap was a little disappointing but we haven’t found a suitable replacement yet and are back to Sunlight. The orange cleaner rocks and smells awesome.

Now I have moved on to skin creams and shampoos. I just bought two giant 1L containers of cheap skin cream, not thinking at all about the ingredients and now my favourite new website told me they have parabens in them and lots of other nasty fantastic stuff. I think I will bring the skin cream to work and find something a little less toxic. I have converted my husband from sodium-laureth-sulphate laden body wash to bar soap until I can get my hands on a big tub of Dr. Bronners. I am off to the grocery store shortly to see if they carry any of the Burt’s Bees or Kiss My Face brand shampoos, all free of SLS and parabens. I am particularly wary of parabens as they are the estrogen-mimicking chemicals that are suspected to cause breast cancer.

After I clean out the skin creams, soaps and shampoos its on to my cosmetics. I am really torn about this one because I finally don’t get zits anymore and my skin cream is on their hit list. This will take endless hours of research to find a suitable replacement so it’ll have to wait. Thankfully my acne creams are all passable in my books. The lip balm I use every day is from Burt’s Bees and also passes. My foundation and eyeshadows are from a fantastic small company that doesn’t use any nasty additives so I am ahead there but all my favourite perfumes, mascaras, eyeliners and fancy hair products are on my new shit list. In the interest of reducing waste I won’t be throwing everything out but as the stuff gets used up I will try to replace it with something paraben and perfume free. Wish me luck!