Your beauty kit might be enviable, but your carbon footprint? Not so much. Beauty products have a strong impact on the environment. If you’re keen on mitigating the toll your beauty products might have on the world, there are many sustainable alternatives in the market today. Pick your level of ease and adopt these simple swaps today:
Easy-peasy ways to adopt sustainable skin care routine
- Swap single-use for multi-purpose products: Check your makeup kit. The moisturiser that’s also a sunscreen? The lipstick that triples up as an eyeshadow as well as cheek stain? Makeup as skincare? Bring it all on. Using beauty products that multitask also means that you need fewer of them, which results in less wastage, less packaging, and less harm to the environment.
- Swap cotton balls for bamboo pads: Cotton uses a notoriously large amount of water to produce and process, making single-use cotton objects like balls and cleaning pads wasteful. Bamboo is sustainable, and microfibre towels that are super effective in taking off makeup, last long, leading to less input into the beauty landfill.
- Swap liquid shampoos and shower gels for bars: It’s time to go old school. The logic is simple here—liquids have a lot of plastic packaging, most of which cannot be recycled. Instead, use shampoo bars and soaps, all of which have bare minimum paper packaging that is most often biodegradable.
- Swap your regular sunscreen for reef-safe sunscreen: Many sunscreens are formulated with oxybenzone and octinoxate. These UV-blocking chemicals cause coral bleaching and are found in chemical sunscreens. Look for mineral-only sunscreens or chemical ones without these two chemicals.
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Halfway there
- Swap excessive spending for mindful choosing: Learn to listen to your skin intuition. You probably don’t need three actives or two kinds of moisturisers. Choose your products mindfully and use what you have instead of clicking ‘add to cart’ whenever an ad prompts you to do so.
- Swap one-time-use products for those that come with refills: Many companies offer refills for their products that don’t have excessive packaging. Ran out of your favourite almond shower gel? Get a refill pouch of it instead of an entirely new bottle.
- Swap plastic disposable razors for stainless steel ones: Let’s face it, a sleek stainless-steel razor also looks awesome on the shelf while your bright pink plastic one is ready for retirement. Make sure you keep changing the blades, and yes, they’re super sharp, so go slow around your curves.
Put your back into it
- Swap ignorance for a little research: Check your ingredients when you purchase beauty products. Avoid microbeads or plastics since they’re not recyclable and harm marine life. Label check for polyethene, polypropylene, polyethene terephthalate and polymethyl methacrylate in lipsticks, deodorants, hair gels and sunscreens. Avoid petroleum derivatives like paraffin oil, propylene glycol and ethylene, and look for vegetable oils, beeswax and cocoa butters instead.
- Swap blind faith in companies for questioning company policies: Sure, your favourite brand might be churning out organic beauty products, organic skincare and organic makeup products. But look for globally recognised certifications—ECOCERT is the most common – to make sure you’re not being greenwashed.
- Swap wastage for recyclable products: Whether you do it via companies with a lot of brands offering recycling programs that invite customers to drop their used bottles at stores and avail of benefits accordingly, or by yourself by mixing your leftover lipstick with a lip balm to gift yourself a tinted lip balm, recycling goes a long way.
Most of this does require a bit of effort, whether that means researching the beauty brand you’re buying, its manufacturing philosophy, rigour in commitment to the environment, and of course, forming your own take on the beauty industry and how you’d like to be part of the sustainable beauty movement. All it takes, though, is one step in the right direction.
