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Natural Petroleum-free Mascara

July 23, 2009

I’ve been searching for a good mascara that wouldn’t coat my lashes with a film of petroleum. Recently, a salesclerk at Vitamin Cottage pointed me to No Miss Natural Mascara.

I have to say that I’ve been very pleased not only with how it goes on, but also with how it stays on and how easily it comes off with soap and water.

Other natural mascaras I’ve tried have left me with heavy black smudges below my eyes as the makeup sank off of my lashes. Some have gone on so gloppy that I’ve had to use several cotton swabs to mop up the mess when my upper lashes flicked wetly against my eyelid.

While I confess that I am not a mascara expert — my lashes used to be so long and thick that they would brush the lenses of my sunglasses so I never wore mascara until recently! Alas, they thinned after childbearing. Sigh. — I have tried the top pick by many beauty magazines (Maybelline) and many other brands both conventional and natural (including Prescriptives, Aveda, CoverGirl, EyesLipsFace, Clinique, Loreal, etc.).

The thing is, I have been concerned about conventional mascaras for a while. Why? Let’s take Almay’s Amazing Lush Lash mascara, as an example. Almay claims to be “hypoallergenic,” which I have often interpreted as “cleaner.” My mistake.

This Almay mascara garners a 7 (10 being the most dangerous) in the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics Skin Deep database of cosmetics and includes this warning:

Ingredients in this product are linked to:
	Cancer
	Developmental/reproductive toxicity
	Violations, restrictions & warnings
	Allergies/immunotoxicity
	Other concerns for ingredients used in this product: Neurotoxicity, Endocrine disruption, Persistence and bioaccumulation, Organ system toxicity (non-reproductive), Multiple, additive exposure sources, Irritation (skin, eyes, or lungs), Enhanced skin absorption, Contamination concerns, Occupational hazards, Biochemical or cellular level changes

Yep: I find those pretty frightening words for something I intend to paint onto my eyelashes and let soak in all day. Hence my search for a better mascara.

No Miss All Natural Mascara is as good a product or better then the conventional kind, and ever so much better for my body and the environment. Let me know if you’ve found some other great natural mascaras!

Blue Sky Natural Soda Pop

July 23, 2009

I’m not a regular soda pop drinker by any means. In fact, in January when Dr. Oz suggested on Oprah that a simple way for people to start losing weight was to stop drinking soda pop, I scoffed. Do people really drink that much soda pop that simply cutting it out could cause weight loss?

Apparently so. We Americans love our soda pop.

Two weeks later, callers left testimonials for Oprah. “I’ve already lost 14 lbs.!” one caller reported excitedly. Others had similar stories.

I started to pay more attention to the soda drinkers around me and realized that some people start drinking soda pop first thing in the morning, instead of or right after coffee, and continue all day long. I counted more than three people I know who nurture a 6-pack-of-Diet Coke-a-day habit. I watched a 20/20 special on Appalacian Mouth, the high incidence of rotting teeth in Applacia due to high consumption of Mountain Dew.

Ugh.

Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy a good soda pop now and then myself. But there’s a lot of stuff in mainstream soda pop I don’t enjoy: high fructose corn syrup, artificial colors and flavors, and caffeine, not to mention other synthetic sweeteners like Aspertame in the diet or low-cal versions.

So I was excited to see Blue Sky soda
on sale recently at our local Vitamin Cottage natural grocery store. When I lived in Santa Fe in the early 90s, Blue Sky was the little local company; now you may find Blue Sky sodas almost anywhere that carries natural products.

Get the Toxins Out of Your Make-up

July 22, 2009

It’s an unpleasant reality that many of the products easily available on store shelves today are actually harmful to our health.

The cosmetics and skin care industries are some of the worst offenders, adding carcinogens, hormone disruptors, immuno-modulators, and other scary chemicals to their formulas of supposedly benign things like shampoos, lotions, and sunscreens.

I’ll grant that when these companies first began making their cosmetics, the toxic effects of many of these chemicals were not known or understood. Petroleum byproducts became cheap and widely available commodities as the global demand for fuel increased. How else were the oil companies going to make a profit on all that waste from drilling and refining?

But now we know better, even if the mainstream cosmetics and skin care products industries think we’re too stupid to care about what we put on our skin to be absorbed into our body systems.

The Environmental Working Group’s top six ingredients to avoid in cosmetics and skin care products:

Fragrance
alpha & beta hydroxy acids (AHA, BHA, lactic acid, glycolic acid)
parabens (methylparabens, propylparbens)
triethanolamine
lodopropynyl butylcarbamate
triclosan (anti-microbial liquid soap)

Here are some other ingredients the EWG says to avoid:

SUNSCREENS: Avoid padimate-O and paba. The low risk ingredients in this category are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.

NAIL POLISH: Avoid dibutylphthalate, formaldehyde, and toluene. The safer way to use: In well-ventilated areas, but “don’t use when pregnant.”

HAIR DYE: Avoid dark permanent hair dyes. The low-risk hair dyes are light-colored hair dyes used infrequently. (See my post about natural hair dye!)

SKIN LIGHTENERS. Avoid hydroquinone and sodium nitrate. The EWG recommends avoiding altogether or at least using skin lighteners infrequently.

ANTI-AGING. Avoid lactic acid and glycolic acid, AHA (alpha hydroxy acid), and BHA (beta hydroxy acid). The EWG recommends avoiding products in this class altogether or at least using infrequently.

SUNLESS TANNING. Avoid coumarin and dihydroxy acetone. EWG recommends using products in this class infrequently, if at all, and using a sunscreen even though you look tan. Cosmetics, as a class, are not as potentially dangerous as drugs. Nevertheless, you should approach their purpose and use with caution, and not assume that some government regulator is looking out for you or that cosmetics are perfectly safe or perfectly harmless.

Today’s Kids Have a Lower Life Expectancy Than Their Parents

July 20, 2009

For the first time in modern history, today’s children look forward to a shorter lifespan than their parents.*

In a The High Cost of Cheap Food, Megan Nix, editor of DiningOut Magazine, connects the dots between Gentically Modified Foods (GMOs), the epidemic of obesity, organic farms, the crisis of poverty, the rise of diabetes, farm-to-table initiatives, and the role of the FDA.

Here are her compelling opening lines:

I used to find Flaming Hot Cheetos, bagged pickles, and the occasional plate of fried chicken in my classroom when I taught Senior English in Louisiana.

I allowed some of my students to eat at their desks after lunch. I had to; there were three pregnant seniors in my fourth period.

Shayna, who was in her third trimester during her last semester of high school, mostly snacked on packets of those horribly orange peanut butter crackers. Over half of my class was obese. After pizza or macaroni or hamburgers from the cafeteria, they’d fall asleep against their will, come to, apologize, then nod off again.

My students were kids who carried iPhones and wore brand-name shoes. Eighty percent were black, 98 percent were low-income. They’d been raised to look as good as they could, but eat as cheaply as possible.

For awhile, you can ignore poverty in schools, outbreaks of cookie dough E. coli, and the fact that 27 percent of our country’s children are obese. But they’re all connected — and these layers of bad news will eventually weigh one down.

Let me just repeat this: “They’d been raised to look as good as they could, but eat as cheaply as possible.”

Now that’s a death knell for a society if I ever heard one.

*Source: a study published in the NEJM in 2005, A Potential Decline in Life Expectancy in the United States in the 21st Century (Olshansky et al 2005), Ref. S. Jay Olshansky, Ph.D., Douglas J. Passaro, M.D., Ronald C. Hershow, M.D., Jennifer Layden, M.P.H., Bruce A. Carnes, Ph.D., Jacob Brody, M.D., Leonard Hayflick, Ph.D., Robert N. Butler, M.D., David B. Allison, Ph.D., and David S. Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D. Volume 352:1138-1145 March 17, 2005 Number 11

Spicy To You May Be Bland to Me

July 15, 2009

Why is it that when you serve the very same meal to three different people you might get three different responses?

I’ll never forget the evening I tested a new Glorious One-Pot Meal recipe at a family gathering. “It needs a little more spice,” my aunt confided at the table. “I would go heavier on the oregano.”

“No!” my mother (her twin sister) insisted. “It’s too spicy already! There are too many herbs.The flavors are too confusing.”

I looked at the other family members licking their plates. “What did you think?”

The husbands thought the meal had been appropriately seasoned.

Lesson: you can’t please all the people all the time.

As it happens, taste is a complex interaction between taste buds and olfactory receptors. Some people are more sensitive to taste and smell, while others are less so. Head injuries and viral infections can rob some of their sense of smell, sending them running for chile peppers to get some sensation to call “taste” on their tongue.

My philosophy is to try to hit the middle ground with my recipes and offer people the option to add more or less spice, according to their personal preferences.

Natural Petroleum-free Mascara

Blue Sky Natural Soda Pop

Get the Toxins Out of Your Make-up

Today’s Kids Have a Lower Life Expectancy Than Their Parents

Spicy To You May Be Bland to Me

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