How to Get Rid of Toxins in Cosmetics

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With cancer-causing chemicals being prevalent in mainstream products, asking the question of how to get rid of toxins in cosmetics is essential!

You probably think about what you put into your body when you eat. Are you conscious of what you put in your body through your skin?

Your skin, being porous, absorbs most of what you put on it. Think about nicotine and birth control patches. They can majorly alter your body by causing your skin to absorb substances into your bloodstream! Around 60% of what we put on our skin is absorbed. Makes sense right?

Well, research from the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a widely-respected organization doing intensive research to help us rid our lives of toxins, shows that people apply, on average, 9 personal care products and 126 ingredients every day. While many people trust that the government ensures all ingredients are safe, unfortunately they don’t! Many personal care brands successfully sneak toxic, and even cancer-causing chemicals into our products.

Wake up call!

I was shocked when I first learned about this! Let me show you how find out whether your cosmetics are toxic, and how to get rid of toxins in your cosmetics that are.

I use EWG’s website to search specific products for their cleanliness levels. It gives each product a ranking between 1-10 to indicate its safety. Based on the product’s ingredients, 1 is the best, and 10 is the worst score.

You can also search specific ingredients instead of products, which is especially helpful if a particular product isn’t in their database. Additionally, you can search by category of product if you want to see EWG’s highest recommendations for a certain type of product.

I’ll show you an example.

Clean & Clear’s Morning Burst Cleanser, a face wash I used as a teenager, is rated an 8, 10 being the worst.

You can scroll on to read about which specific ingredients caused the ratings. Here are a few:

Those ingredients were likely in my bloodstream, hurting my body’s ability to function well.

Unfortunately, many personal care product brands have these and many more toxins in them. We’d never know about them if not for resources like EWG.

Good news!

The good news is that there are companies making excellent natural and toxin-free personal care products, and you can find those by searching EWG’s website as well (look for ratings of 1 to 3). However, when you first start switching your mainstream products to natural ones the task can feel overwhelming, and the price tag on those natural products can be daunting.

So, I’ve developed a list of my favorite affordable natural products for women. I personally use and love all the products on the list! Check it out and let me know what you think, or if you have any recommendations of your own.

Checking for toxins on-the-go

If you want to search products on the go, I also recommend using the Think Dirty app. It will “give you easy-to-understand info on the product, track dirty ingredients and shop for cleaner options” with over 550,000 products in its database! You can even use it to scan a barcode and read about a product’s ingredients and safety while you shop.

You can learn so much more about how to get rid of toxins, what the toxins are themselves, why they’re legal, and which ones to avoid most at EWG.org.

Do you have any other tips on how to get rid of toxins in cosmetics? Share below!

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