Let’s take a minute and think about how many beauty products go on your body each day. Face wash, moisturizer, sunscreen, all your makeup, lotion, hair products, the list goes on and on. In fact, the average woman’s annual grooming routine exposes her to over 500 different synthetic chemicals. Why should we be concerned about this number?

Did you know anything that goes on our skin is absorbed into our bloodstream within 30 seconds? Our bodies were not made to process synthetic chemicals. Nature doesn’t make these synthetic chemicals, so our body doesn’t know how to handle them. There’s even been research showing many of the synthetic chemicals commonly found in most beauty products can disrupt our hormones, and cause a laundry list of health problems.

Fragrance is one of the worst offenders. Many chemicals can hide behind that one ingredient. A 2014 study showed that our wide exposure to these chemicals can lead to diseases like type II diabetes, autism spectrum disorders and many other common illnesses.

Think about how often you lather your entire body with lotion. How much makeup goes on your face each morning? What are you washing that makeup off with each night? Are you covering your face with a moisturizer before bed every night? Take a look at the ingredients in that bottle.

(If you’re not into the technical info about these ingredients, now is the time to scroll on down to “Practical Advice”. I don’t want to bore you to tears!)

Beauty Product Ingredients

Here are some of the worst offenders in that list of ingredients:

• Parabens
• Phthalates (Fragrance)
• Sulfates
• Ethylenedimine and Tetraacetic Acid (EDTA)
• Formaldehyde
• Propylene Glycol
• Toluene
• Talc

Some of these ingredients may not even be listed by these names. For example, the most common formaldehyde-releasing preservatives are: Ddiazolidinyl urea, Imidazolidinyl urea. Dimethyl-dimethyl hydantoin, Quaternium-15 and Bronopol.

Just a few of the health problems linked to these 8 ingredients are: allergies, skin toxicity, biochemical changes in the body, endocrine disruption, developmental and reproductive disorders, tissue irradiation and organ toxicity, and cancer. They’re also hazardous to the environment.

I’m not sharing all of this information with you to scare you and cause you to throw out everything on your bathroom counter. But I do want you to be well-informed when it comes to making choices for your body. We often pay attention to what we consume, but it’s just as important to be cautious with what we put on our bodies.

And it’s up to us to stay safe. The United States government hasn’t passed any laws regulating beauty products in over 75 years. The European Union bans over 1300 cosmetic chemicals, while the U.S. only bans 11.

We have to watch out for ourselves. Read your labels. Educate yourself on which products are safe.

Practical Advice for #SafeSkin

Don’t go throw out all of your beauty products today. These items are expensive and it’s not realistic for most of us to purchase everything we need in one day! Start small, figure out which brand you like the most and build up a new collection of safe products.

I started with Young Living hand soap, Beautycounter foundation, and Pacifica mascara. It’s taken me a couple of years to get rid of all my unsafe products and curate a collection I feel good about.

There are plenty of safe beauty products out there that actually work really well. You don’t have to compromise your health to look and feel beautiful. It’s worth doing a little bit of research to find out which companies you can trust.

One of the best places to research ingredients is the Environmental Working Group. Type in a product and take a look at how it measures up on their scale of safe ingredients.

Do you recommend any other companies? I’d love to connect with you over safe beauty and share our research! (Don’t forget to take a close look at what you put on your baby’s skin too!)