Investigating Your Stuff: The Shower

How many products do you use to get ready to leave the house on a typical day? I read somewhere that the average woman uses 14 products every morning. I counted mine today, and if you include the shower, the sink, and the makeup bag, I'm up to a whopping 21 products! Twenty-one. Wow.

And since I'm feeling pretty bedraggled today, and it is snowing, AND I am running out of some products that I use a lot and will soon need to replace, I decided to go on a product muck-raking internet adventure and look up each of my most-used products and see where they stand on the product safety/goodness scale.

The best sources I have found for product investigation are the SkinDeep cosmetic safety database and the Good Guide (both linked under Green Inspiration on this blog). SkinDeep rates products on a 0-10 scale, with 0 indicated zero risk/toxicity and 10 indicating high risk/toxicity. The Good Guide ranks products on their health/safety, environmental impact, and social impact on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the best.

It's a pretty surprising exercise, and sometimes frustrating, because you can have something that rates low on toxicity (Yay!) but also low on its overall "Goodness" b/c of its environmental impact/social impact. Even more common is something rating pretty high on the Good Guide, but pretty poorly on the SkinDeep ratings. The Good Guide's ratings can end up skewing higher for a product that's a bit more toxic because that same product may use recyclable packaging or be part of a socially responsible product line that still manages to sneak in some carcinogens.

That's why this is a good project for a rainy day. It takes some digging. But I wanted to know, so I did the research. There were some surprising findings! I won't bore with a product by product rehashing, but I'll give you some highlights.

Here's what I've got in my shower:

Stuff I use regularly.

1. Yes to Cucumbers shampoo and conditioner - 2 on SkinDeep (low risk) and 6.9 on the Good Guide (I expected it to be higher on the Good scale, actually).

2. JASON natural bodywash - a disappointing 4 on the SkinDeep (moderately toxic) and only a 6.1 on the Good Guide. I bet you thought that if you bought it at Whole Paycheck, you must be getting something uberhealthy, right? That's what I thought.

3. Color Treated Hair products - The Good Guide gives these anywhere from a 4.8 (pretty un-good) to a 6.8 (pretty good!), but SkinDeep confirmed what I suspected - they all fall into the moderate/high risk group for toxicity.

4. Yummy-smelling "philosophy" products - these were a Christmas gift, but even so, they deserve to be shown the curb. They get between a 5-6 for toxicity. All those sulfates and fragrances and stuff. Sad.

5. Whole Foods 365 Body Lotion - this was the biggest shocker of them all... only a 5.9 on the Good Guide, and "not enough information" on SkinDeep. Again with the Whole Foods healthy fake-out. I'll know better than to assume that if it twice what I would pay for a similar product at Target and claims to be "natural" and/or "organic" that that always means it is actually good stuff.

Luckily, I'm weaning myself off of hair dye, so I can confidently dump the color treatment aids. And by dump of course I mean go out of my way to recycle their containers. I'm switching over to some SUPERDUPER HEALTHY and safe soaps and other bath products just as soon as the other moderately unhealthy products are used up. That will be a separate post, because I'm psyched to try them out.

The big questions I now have are:
1. How should I dispose of the stuff I don't want to keep? Drain? Landfill? Is giving your barely used bottle of expensive High-End scented body soap to a friend essentially saying "Here, I don't want this to give me cancer, but I hear that you don't care about such things, so maybe you would like it." ?

2. When do you use something up to avoid being wasteful, and when do you say "Get behind me, Phalates!" and toss the thing immediately?

Please weigh in with any thoughts or suggestions.

Up next will be Investigating Your Stuff: The Makeup Bag!