Your body will be around a lot longer than that pair of shoes. Invest in yourself, it lasts longer.
What You Put ON Your Body Is as Important as What You Put IN It. Purchase products you know are safe.
You’ve heard the old adage, “you are what you eat.” Now, I’d like to add another to that: “You are what you apply.” To your skin, that is! Substances that affect your overall health and wellbeing don’t simply work their way through your system by travelling the gut alone. An often-overlooked route – the transdermal (through the skin) route – allows substances ranging from the beneficial to the bad to enter your bloodstream and circulate throughout your body. So, if you are what you eat, and you are what you apply, the question is: What are you?
Whether you are a man, woman or child, it is likely that you use some form of personal care products daily. From the moment you stumble out of bed, the routine begins: you brush your teeth with toothpaste; cleanse your skin with soap or shower gel; wash your face with face wash; suds your scalp with shampoo and conditioner; use shaving cream and aftershave; apply lotion, deodorant, perfume or cologne, sunscreen; and, if you are a woman, you can add makeup into the mix. Stop for a moment and think about how many personal care or cosmetic products you use in a day. How many did you come up with – two, five, ten or fifteen?
According to the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a Washington DC-based advocacy organization, the average American uses approximately 10-15 personal care products with a total of 126 different ingredients daily. This figure doesn’t even take into account re-applications of products throughout the day. We brush our teeth three times a day. We wash our hands 6-12 times a day. We re-apply sunscreen every few hours that we are in the sun. We may even shower more than once per day. When you do the math, it’s incredible to consider the number of items that we slather across our skin every day. However, the number of products used isn’t the issue; rather, it’s the ingredients in those products and what they do once in our bloodstream that is cause for concern.