My new arsenal of shower products.
So I’m not sure the average joe not driven by needing to complete this assignment would be willing to give up good smelling, sudsing shampoo to wash their hair in vinegar. I wish so badly that the honey went better for me. It sounds like it did work for others, but man that adjustment period where your hair has to get used to it lasting a month?!?!? No thank you says the world and even this girl. But I’m still trying other options on that front so hopefully I can get one that works for me.
HOWEVER, this face wash is awesome. This is an easy sell. Anyone who smells it and feels it is going to want it. Seriously, it’s wonderful.
But first, here’s why environmentally the facewash I was using before was not good. Neutrogena face scrub and many other face washes, body washes, and hand soaps contain plastic microbeads. These beads are supposed to provide an abrasive to clean out pores and remove dead skin. The beads are tiny. On the scale of a third of a millimeter. These beads are too small to be filtered out at treatment plants and so make their way out to the water.
In Lake Erie, scientists found 1.1 million plastic particles per square kilometer. In Lake Michigan, 17,000 pieces of this bitty plastic per square kilometer. Yeah okay so tiny bits of plastic. We can’t see it. Surely the big chunks of plastic would be worse. What are these microbeads going to do?
Plastics are dangerous because plastic absorbs toxins and chemicals very easily. The more surface area a plastic has, the better they absorb things like pesticides, flame retardants, ect. So a whole bunch of little pieces will absorb the chemicals better than the equivalent whole piece. The little microbeads pose a threat because they look quite a bit like food to the residents of the water. The little bits of plastic are approximately the same size as fish eggs. Scientists worry that the particles containing toxins will make their way up the food chain to larger animals and to humans. According to Stiv Wilson, “If you ask me, as a plastic pollution activist, if I would prefer a milk jug in a lake or the equivalent amount of plastic in a milk jug in [plastic] dust in a lake, I would say milk jug every time.”
Some states like Illinois are working on a ban of the microbeads, but in the mean time, you can check your own stuff for words like polyethylene or polypropylene or if they straight up say microbeads and maybe give those products a pass. There are many alternatives being used including sea salt, apricot husks, and coconut shells. However, the biodegradable plastic you might also want to give a miss. It won’t biodegrade in natural conditions in the water. It has to be very specific. I have found another alternative in this beautiful concoction I have been washing my face in.
Lavender Face Wash
1 tbsp baking soda
2 tbsp oatmeal
1 tsp dried lavender
A little bit of honey
This is a recipe I got from this site. I started with dried lavender that we picked last summer at Lavender Hills. Picking lavender is an awesome experience because there’s just fields of beautiful purple rolling off into the distance. It’s also very cheap. A bundle is only $5 and is about the size in the picture above. I did not use anywhere near that much.
Baking soda and oats I bought in the normal way, but the honey also came locally like I talked about in the previous post. You make the powder separately by putting oats, baking powder, and lavender buds in a blender. Leave them going for a while because the finer the particles are, the better it will feel. But not too long because friction and heat. I made 8 times the recipe, or enough to fit in my little jelly jar. Then when I’m ready to use it, I mix a little bit with some honey in my palm and put it on my face like a mask. My mom prefers mixing it with water to make it more liquid, but I like the texture of the basic piece. It contains a nice abrasive made by the oats, an awesome smell of lavender and honey, a moisturizer in the honey, and a wash from the baking soda. This one I fully intend to use forever. It’s awesome.
Also, lavender is just awesome.
Lavender lemonade made from boiling the fresh stems of the lavender like tea and using it to mix.
https://news.vice.com/article/plastic-microbeads-from-body-wash-are-contaminating-the-great-lakes
Eco-geek 