Beauty Tips For Body Care
As we are transitioning into an era of skincare and self care, there is almost an overwhelming flow of misinformation and fallacy towards chemicals and natural ingredients. Ultimately, we see a lot of fear-mongering and false consumer beliefs which stems from marketing or bigger companies. And so forth, I think as consumers we should further educate ourselves and strengthen our critical thinking skills to be able to identify such misinformation. With that said, here are major key points I learned in The Eco Well's Green Beauty Panel Discussion. This panel included "Laura Markley, PhD student, plastic researcher and the brains behind the popular blog Waste Free PhD. Dennis Abbeduto, cosmetic chemist and personal care business manager at Colonial Chemical. Perry Romanowski, cosmetic chemist, co-host at the Beauty Brains podcast, my favourite beauty science podcast, and founder at Chemists Corner. Damien Perriman, industry thought leader in the biotech space and VP at Genomatica. And Kenna Whitnell, biochemist and plant extraction expert, she also runs the beauty science Youtube channel Kenna." I took these notes initially for personal interests, however I thought I would post them here if anyone was interested in sustainability in skincare. Most of these are not my words as I pulled many words from the people above and just categorized them though I did add some of my words at the end.Sustainability Challenges in the Beauty industry:Packaging & Manufacturing, and Shipping: There are factors to consider even when using material or product labeled as “sustainable” or “eco-friendly” material such as glass. Glass has major downsides like the large amounts of plastic packaging, bubble wrap, packing peanuts, and energy to transport impacts the carbon foot print. In regards to recycling glass, it largely depends on your local recycling center and county. Laura Markley states, “so I know in my County, where I live in New York, the glass goes to the recycling plant but it's not actually made into a new product. It's used as landfill cover and that's pretty typical for a lot of places in the U.S. Especially because the glass on the conveyor belt will typically break and it'll just go down and become part of the kind of contaminated spread that's going along the conveyor belt. So, you can use that to cover a landfill but you can't take that glass out and make it into a product again so I think there's a lot of complicated aspects to the plastic issue.”The demand and glamorization for “all-natural” and “exotic” materials in skincare: Greenwashing and marketing tactics drive consumer beliefs that natural is better for the skin and sustainability. Sometimes, “all-natural” is detrimental to the eco-system as it can come from endangered species or needs a lot of plant material. In reality, it takes a lot more resources like land, water, labor, transportation, and energy to create a plant-based product than it does a synthetic product that is made in a laboratory. Petrochemicals are used in the vessels for harvesting, transportation, and in the process of extracting to produce the viable ingredient. In addition, there are harmful harvesting practices. One example is the licorice root which is popular in both natural and cosmetic products andis planted in mass quantities then bulldozed. This leads to the land being unusable for several years as it completely depletes the soil which damages ecosystems.Misinformation: Because of the consumer demand for “all-natural” and “chemical-free” products (chemical-free products do NOT exist btw), bigger cosmetic companies tend to market towards the “all-natural” wave and ultimately neglect the sustainability aspect. There are also many NGOs that associate with sustainability, but also promote that “natural is better.” One major NGO that spews these nasty hubbawubs is the EWG which largely are not science-based and spread fallacies about ingredients.
Girls Blog 2015
Submitted by kt_237
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