Thursday, January 31, 2008

How Skin Deep is Your Beauty (Products)?

I've been interested a long time in what exactly are those bizarre ingredients listed on my health and beauty products. Of course, being vegetarian, my first concern is making sure that the products I buy do not involve animal cruelty or testing (one and the same to me). Second, I want as natural a product as possible. I have a great book of common ingredients..a dictionary of sorts of typical cosmetic ingredients. You'd be surprised how bad typical products are..even ones labeled "natural." Urea, a standard ingredient in many products is actually a derivative of urine! Ew!

A friend recently gave me a link to this site:
http://www.cosmeticsdatabase.com/index.php

What a great resource. Instead of flipping through my little cosmetic ingredient dictionary I can now just search for my products..and they are all rated by hazard. Some things have been surprising. I plan to run all my products through it this weekend when I have more time.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Amanda! I miss you at pt. I just read your last several posts. That recipe does look really good, I'm going to try it. As to the cosmetics issue, I use Arbonne Products which are supposed to be natural and not animal tested. I'm going to use your link to verify. Anyway, hello and I'll catch up with you again later!

deb55

Lindsay (Happy Herbivore) said...

I'm always disgusted when my friends slather on creams and lotions that smell like chemicals and have 8,000 weird ingredients. Forgetting that those companies hurt poor innosent animals... your skin is your biggest organ... why on earth would you want to put chemicals and toxins all over it! Thats why I only use organic, natural and cruelty-free vegan products...

I didn't know that about urea - GROSS

p.s. Debgrut, PETA approved Arboone, so I'd say its cruelty-free for sure.

Amanda said...

I totally agreed! I can't understand why people keep buying that stuff when it's got so many known toxins and irritants in it.

As a part two to this post, I realized that I had been using an eye gel from DHC (from Japan). I don't know why I ordered it without checking the ingredients..placental gel..um, yup, like placentas from pregnant women..ugh! ick! gross! In the trash it goes. Not that anything is wrong with placenta but hey, it's for babies not for my eyes.