Found - Paraben and Phthalate-free Conditioner
Posted by leah on Sep 26, 2008
I found a paraben and phthalate-free hair conditioner that actually works for my somewhat difficult hair type. It’s made by Avalon Organics, and it isn’t cheap - but it actually works so well on my hair that I can use a bit less than I normally would, so hopefully that will help offset the price a bit. Anyway, the product is called Avalon Organics Lavender Nourishing Conditioner
Avalon Organics is committed to making products free of parabens and phthalates, which means that I can try *any* of their hair and skin products and know that I’m not exposing myself or my breastmilk to chemicals that may harm me or my son. Granted, their other products might not work for me, but at least I found a hair conditioner that works!
If you didn’t see my previous post about toxins in beauty products, here’s a quick recap of why I’m looking for non toxic products:
- I’ve been hearing about harmful chemicals in cosmetics and other beauty products
- I started reading about the research behind the headlines
- I decided that even though the jury is out on many of these chemicals, avoiding them wouldn’t be a bad idea until there is a consensus among scientists on whether or not they are safe
- As with most other health concerns, pregnant and nursing women should be careful because everything is passed to fetus or breastfeeding infant - I happen to be a nursing mom
Here are the ingredients I found that are commonly used in beauty products that may be toxic:
- parabens - easily identifiable because if you read the ingredients, you’ll see paraben
- phthalates - not so easily identifiable, because they are often used in fragrance, which may be listed as simply “fragrance”
I wanted to switch all my beauty products to safer, less toxic formulas, but I was having trouble finding hair conditioner that actually worked for me. My hair is fine-textured but there is a lot of it, and I wear it long despite the fact that it tangles easily and I tend to get dry, split ends. So even without eliminating common ingredients, a lot of products don’t work for me.
Before learning what to look for in the ingredient list, I bought some “greenwashed” products, which I later found out did contain parabens and/or phthalates, and not only that - they didn’t work for me either.
Researching toxins in beauty products
Posted by leah on Sep 19, 2008
I decided to start my research on toxins in beauty products by heading to the local library. The “new nonfiction” section had two books, both published earlier this year, that caught my eye. Green Babies, Sage Moms: The Ultimate Guide to Raising Your Organic Baby
Green Babies, Sage Moms has several chapters that deal with beauty products - specifically, what to avoid using during pregnancy, and what not to use on your baby. Now, I don’t know how much research went into writing this book, so I can’t guarantee that the information I got from it is completely accurate, but I did find out about two groups of chemicals that the author recommends avoiding in cosmetics, hair and skin care, and other products. One group is parabens, and the other is pthalates. Parabens are easy enough to identify in an ingredient list because the word “paraben” will be in the ingredient if it is one. Phthalates are harder to identify because some of them have names that don’t say phthalate in them, and they are frequently included in fragrance, which is listed as simply “fragrance” on the label.
When I was pregnant, I started using more natural brands of beauty products, because I’d heard about chemicals potentially causing fetal damage, but I didn’t know which chemicals I should be avoiding. After reading this book, I was curious to see if the products I bought were free of pthalates and parabens or not. Since beauty products aren’t regulated very much, it’s easy for a brand to claim to be all natural, but it’s harder to know if that claim means anything.
I was happy to find out that my Burts Bees lotions, both for me and baby, are pthalate and paraben free. My Trader Joe’s shampoo is pthalate free, but not paraben free. It’s also free of laurel sulfate, so I assume that’s another chemical to avoid, but it hasn’t come up in my reading yet - obviously I have more research to do. My non-natural hair conditioner, not surprisingly, contains all kinds of chemicals I’ve never heard of, including some pthalates and parabens. (As I said in my first post on this topic, I’ve yet to find an even slightly natural conditioner that works well with my hair type, but I’m on a mission to find one.) My sugar scrubs - one for my face made by daisywares, and a Trader Joe’s brand scrub for body - seem to have the safest ingredients of anything in my bathroom: sugar, edible plant-derived oils, and natural fragrances.
Toxic Shampoo?
Posted by leah on Aug 25, 2008
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how there are potentially toxic ingredients in beauty products, such as shampoo, moisturizer, and lipgloss. I’m not sure how much to believe, and how much is hype, but if it is true that some common ingredients could cause cancer, I’d definitely prefer to use products that don’t contain those ingredients.
The problem: what am I supposed to be avoiding, and do products without those ingredients actually work?
I already use natural cleaning products around the house, and for some beauty products, I’ve found options I can make at home (or buy from someone who makes them at home) that contain food ingredients, which I’m reasonably sure are non-toxic, since I use the same ingredients when I cook meals for myself.
Here’s my problem: I don’t know enough about the non-food things that are added to beauty products to know which ones are potentially unsafe (or perhaps just believed to be unsafe by some people, because really, I don’t know if they actually are unsafe or not) but I’d really like to find a hair conditioner and detangler that I know isn’t bad for me and that works well.
My hair is long, and there’s a ton of it, but it’s fine-textured, so it gets tangled really easily. I’ve tried two all-natural conditioners so far, and neither worked well for my hair (but they were fine for my husband, whose shorter hair doesn’t have the same tangling problem as mine). So I’m on a mission to find out more about which non-natural ingredients are believed to be toxic, so that I can go to the store able to read the ingredient lists and know which ones are okay to try. And then I’m going to test a bunch of non-toxic conditioning products and see if ANY of them actually work for me.
Know of a great product, or reliable information online about which ingredients are toxic? Leave me a comment, I’d love to hear opinions/advice about this.