When you begin to clean out your life from the inside out you start researching EVERYTHING. I am an avid label reader, but when I found out that reading labels may not be the whole story I got really frustrated and angry.
Did you know that Federal law allows companies to leave some ingredients off their product labels? If a company “claims” the ingredient is a trade secret or can fall under the “fragrance” generality they don’t have to be listed on your product’s ingredient label at all!
Fragrance may include any number of over 3,000 stock chemicals, none of which are required to be listed on your label. Independent testings of fragrance ingredients have found ingredients linked to hormone disruption and sperm damage! And we wonder why there are higher levels of all kinds of diseases and allergies…
Want to read more? This Myth vs Fact article is a great researched and sited article to get started.
Are you angry yet?
Even though at times it makes me want to throw up my arms in disgust and think I’ll never get anywhere, that doesn’t help me or anyone else. So like my medical stuff, I kept searching and asking around.
Using Environmental Working Groups app or online database was a big help for me because I could read the label and check online for backup confirmation if I was missing something. Now the asterisk here is that on many products you will see “limited” next to that product’s rating because the company also did not release to EWG ALL of the ingredients.
I have found a few products here and there that fell in the safer EWG rating of 1 or 2 for makeup products over the last few years. It is a splattering of one or two from brand A, and one or two from brand B…so it takes a lot of time and isn’t convenient to say the least, but hey when you are head strong to fix yourself you deal with a lot of inconvenience.
When I found Beautycounter I was so excited about their mission of “safer products” for everyone and that their biggest stance was transparency of everything that they put in their products. There was no guessing involved!
Because so many “safer” or “natural” products I had tried didn’t always live up to their chemical filled counterparts I went in with low expectations. Good news for all of us though is that Beautycounter was different! I can tell you that from the first product I bought, Protect Stick Sunscreen, my family and I were hooked.
I used the products personally for a little over a year, was asked to write some product reviews for my medical practice so I got to try those extra products over a few more months, and then finally said these products and this company is really doing things right and I want to be aligned with Beautycounter. So I took the leap and am now a Beautycounter consultant and educator. I felt that it was very mission aligned with what I was doing here on Modern Cavemom, and that just like I would give my friends recommendations on recipes, doctors, and the what not, I would absolutely do the same on the products I use.
Time to breathe and reflect!
Modern Cavemom 