Posts Tagged ‘parabens’

Posted on June 12, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

Create Your Green Personal Care Library

Whether you’re rocking a Kindle or committed to published paper and ink, there’s plenty of reading resources when it comes to greening your bath and beauty routine.

Style, Naturally

Summer Rayne Oakes

Green style guru and eco advocate Summer Rayne Oakes gives you a luxury-kissed directory with lots of product photos (think eco chic catalog). It includes the best and brightest in green and organic personal care. Other categories beyond beauty include clothing, shoes, handbags and jewelry.  Ms. Oakes is everywhere these days – from Planet Green correspondent to eco shoe designer (her label is Zoe & Zac for Payless); thanks to her deeply-felt commitment sustainability and her spirited, honest persona, you can never get enough!

Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Business

Stacy Malkan

Winner of Treehugger’s Best of Green Awards 2010 in the Fashion & Beauty category, this book is brought to you by one of the founders behind the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. The book covers the science and politics of chemicals in personal care products, and offers an inside look at the five-year campaign by environmental and health groups to pressure the U.S. cosmetics industry to use safer ingredients. Malkan is particularly committed to the vulnerability of teens, a topic we’ve covered on NapaValleyBath.com.

The Green Beauty Guide

Judy Gabriel

One of my favorite resources, this book offers a fantastic combination of solid, well-researched facts about the toxins in personal care products and tons of DIY recipes, many of which have been reposted on Napa Valley Bath. With her smart green beauty style, Gabriel wants green beauty to ‘save the world, one face at a time.’ Julie will help you to say good riddance to phthalates and parabens and hello to a toxin-free beauty routine. And she makes it both fun and interesting.

The Beauty Myth

Naomi Wolf

It may have been penned in 1991, but the premise holds up: images of beauty are too often used to make women feel bad. Although not green in nature, this book reminds us to consider the source of the beauty message – and reject its negative impact. Millions of women dare to compare themselves to unrealistic ideals of beauty; on this topic alone, The Beauty Myth still has a lot to offer.

What books inspire you to up your organic ante and toss toxins out of your life? Let us know here!

Posted on May 22, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

Skin Detox 101

It’s time to tell your skin whose in charge…

• Out and off, dead skin cells!
• Open up, clogged pores!
• Brighten up, skin!

After all, when it comes to your skin, you’re the boss!

A is for Antioxidants

Antioxidants are essential for detoxifying your skin. They sop up the free radicals that are implicated in aging and skin damage, so antioxidant-rich care is critical.

Napa Valley Bath’s Lavender Sea Salt Scrub is rich in antioxidants like vitamin E from our home-grown extra virgin Sevillano olive oil.   The dead sea salts in this magical concoction slough away dry skin, opens up pores, and restores luminosity to your skin.

Increase your antioxidant intake with these ingredients:

• Ascorbic acid (vitamin C)
• Green tea
• Idebenone
• Coffeeberry
• Coenzyme Q10

Healthy Body, Healthy Skin!

Luckily, our skin is highly regenerative. It’s your liver, kidneys, and digestive system that work hard to remove waste and toxins from your body. When these three waste removal systems become overloaded, your skin picks up the slack.

Avoid sun and watch what you eat and drink; these three things will help keep skin toxin-free in the first place.

Be Your Skin’s Advocate

Being a smart consumer is critical to finding the purist personal care products and keeping your skin in permanent detox mode. Read labels and ask questions:  you have to be your own advocate when seeking out toxin-free personal care products you can fully trust.

The Environmental Working Group’s top ingredients to avoid as seen on their handy Shopper’s Guide to Safe Cosmetics include:

• DMDM hydantoin and imidazolidinyl urea
• Fragrance and dyes
• Methylchloroisothiazolinone and Methylisothiazolinone
• Parabens or “-paraben”
• “PEG” and “-eth”
• Sodium lauryl or laureth sulfate
• Triclosan and triclocarban
• Triethanolamine (TEA)

Bottom line: skin detox starts by treating your skin right in the first place. Use simpler, fewer products overall, and opt for all organic when possible.

Now go and glow!

Posted on May 13, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

Avoid Junk Food Skingredients!

The food we eat, the air we breathe: these tend to be our internal focal points when it comes to making healthy decisions and avoiding toxic ingredients.

Too often, skin care tends to lag behind…especially when high-end skin care products are so expensive. After all, how could there possibly be anything bad in a moisturizer that costs $50 for a tiny tube?

Big Organ, Big Appetite

Your body’s largest organ, skin can soak up contaminants in much larger quantities than intestines or lungs.

Amazingly, our skin can absorbs up to 60% of substances applied to its surface. Good news for the water, vitamins, minerals and oxygen that it ingests. Bad news for cancer-causing ingredients – or what I like to call ‘ junk food skingredients’ – that are so common in skin care products

Chemical substances spread seamlessly throughout the body using skin as a super-efficient conduit. Consider the myriad drugs that are delivered via skin ‘patches’ to help people do everything from stopping smoking to taking birth control to inhibiting motion sickness.

When a potentially toxic substance worms its way past your skin’s barrier, here’s what happens:

• Blood vessels and lymph ducts, located in the epidermis and dermis layers of your skin, absorb them
• Lymph, a colorless fluid made of plasma, carries chemicals across the body
• Many of the chemicals are filtered out by your liver and flushed out by your kidneys
• Some substances remain inside the body, contributing to what’s called your ‘body burden’ – which can remain for decades

“Eat” Right

Be smart when it comes to feeding your skin. Avoid bath and beauty products – even the most expensive ones – that contain junk food skingredients like…

• Phthalates
• Formaldehyde
• Phenols
• Sodium laureth sulfate
• Coal tar
• Toxic dyes
• Synthetic fragrances

Opt instead for organic and all-natural bath and beauty goodness from companies like Napa Valley Bath.

Posted on May 4, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

How Green is Your Beauty Salon?

What is your favorite beauty salon doing to provide you with greener, healthier beauty solutions? After all, you’re paying a pretty penny for salon treatments: shouldn’t they be good for you, both inside and out?

With competition fierce in the beauty biz, offering eco-friendly, super healthy green beauty care benefits everyone…so let your salon know you give a hoot when it comes to the ingredients in your treatments, from hair to skincare to nails and beyond!

Seek Out Synthetic-Free Beauty

Ideally, a beauty salon should use products that contain natural botanical extracts, essential oils, vitamins, minerals and substances derived from natural sources.

To Dye For

Non-toxic hair dye may sound like a contradiction in terms, but it does exist. PureOlogy, for example, is a 100% vegan line of sulfate-free hair color used by discerning eco salons.

According to a live chat I had recently with an Aveda consultant, Aveda uses “coloring services that are 97% naturally derived – which is healthy for your hair – leaving it essentially damage-free.   It’s infused with conditioning plant oils for shinier, healthy-looking color.” Even if you don’t go to an Aveda salon, inquire about the toxicity factor of the hair dye that they are using.

Natural Nails Now!

Nail polish lines like Zoya offer safer, more natural nail polish options – a nice departure given that conventional nail polishes are typically chock full of  toxins like toluene and formaldehyde. Salons like Priti in NYC make an amazing soy-based nail-polish remover: see ya later acetone and ethyl acetate! If the place where your favorite mani/pedi technician works doesn’t offer these products, buy them yourself and bring them along on your next appointment!

Putting Your Face On

Feather light mineral makeup allows your skin to breathe – in stark contrast to most other paraben-laden, conventional makeup brands. Dr. Hauschka makeup, for example, is made from botanicals and natural minerals, some of which sounds good enough to eat, like their Translucent Makeup made with an avocado and jojoba infusion. Other green and healthy makeup brands include Jane Iredale and Zuzu Luxe by Gabriel Cosmetics

Sustainable Structure

Amazing green salons like the Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Design)-certified Nusta Spa in Washington D.C. not only make spa services super green and healthy, the spa itself is a study in eco-love.  Using LED and florescent lighting, implementing a strict recycling policy, and using energy star appliances are all ways you can tell how your salon measures up on planetary pay-back.

Remember: the more people ask about product toxins, the more salon-owners will realize that this is something consumers care about!  Do you know a green salon you’d like to tell fellow readers about? Let us know, here!

Posted on April 13, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

Give Your Beauty Shopping List a Makeover

Step one to being a consumer of healthier products is honing your expertise at reading ingredient labels. Use these lists as a guide when buying ‘conventional’ (non-organic) bath and beauty products and get smart while you beautify!

Cleansers

It’s great to reward your face at the end of a long day with a fantastic cleanser. Go at it the green way.

Common Cleanser Ingredients to Avoid:

• Amphoteric 2, 5 or 29
• Cocamido betaine
• Cocamidopropyl betaine
• Sorbitan laurate
• Sorbitan palmitate
• Sorbitan stearate

Opt for These Ingredients in Your Cleanser:

• Alfalfa extract
• Flaxseed
• Honeysuckle oil
• Oatmeal
• Quillaya bark
• Yucca Root for Green

Moisturizers

A good moisturizer is a crucial part of your personal care repertoire.

Common Moisturizer Ingredients to Avoid:

• Mineral oil
• Petroleum jelly
• Propylene glycol

Opt for These Natural Ingredients in Your Moisturizer:

• Aloe vera
• Avocado
• Beeswax
• Bluebottle (cornflower)
• Candelilla wax
• Cocao butter
• Jojoba oil
• Macademia nut oil
• Pycnogenol from pine trees
• Rice bran oil
• Shea butter
• Sunflower oil
• Sweet almond oil
• Vitamins A, C and E

Preservatives

We need preservatives in our personal care products to stop fungi bacteria, fungi, microbes and oxidation. But chemical preservatives can be irritating – and the long-term effects of them on our health are not yet known.

Avoid these common chemical-based preservatives when buying any beauty and bath product:

• Imidazolidinyl urea and diazolidinyl urea, often disguised as Germall 115 and Germall II

All parabens, including:

• Esters
• Para-hydroxybenzoic acid
• Methylparaben
• Propylparaben
• Butylparaben
• Benzoic acid
• Isobutyl p-hydroxybenzoate
• P-methoxycarbonylphenol

In addition to buying ‘paraben-free,’ opt for safer preservatives like:

• Seed extract
• Phenozyethanol
• Potassium sorbate
• Vitamin A (retinyl or retinoic acid)
• Vitamin E (tocopherol)
• Citric acid
• Pycnogenol

These intimidating words might remind us of high school chemistry (which in my case, I didn’t fare too well at…). But the more you opt for better ingredients – and avoid the more dangerous ones – you’ll be able to craft a beauty routine you can truly trust

You can find many of these ‘good’ ingredients in Napa Valley Bath products. And as always, if you have any questions about any of them, just let us know!

Posted on February 20, 2010 - by Leslie Billera

Teens and Personal Care: A Cautionary Tale

The average woman uses 12 personal care products a day…and the ever-enthusiastic teenage girl? More like 17.

As we’ve shared with you, many conventional personal care products carry a heavy chemical load for all of us.  But teenagers are especially at risk: they’re at a period of accelerated development, physically, that makes them particularly vulnerable.

A 2008 Environmental Research Group study backed up these concerns.

The study took samples from 20 teen girls, age 14-19. Harrowing highlights include:

• They found 16 chemicals from 4 chemical families – phthalates, triclosan, parabens, and musks – in blood and urine samples in the 20 girls tested.

• Studies link these chemicals to potential health effects including cancer and hormone disruption.

• These tests feature first-ever exposure data for parabens, a common cosmetic preservative.  It indicated that young women are widely exposed to parabens, with 2 parabens – methylparaben and propylparaben – detected in every single girl tested.

Purchasing non-toxic personal care products is step one to a lower chemical count for teens. Turning teens on to what their peers are doing to make healthier, greener choices is another step.  Check out Teens Turning Green, a national program of engaged kids working towards a more non-toxic world, from personal care to school to lobbying Washington.  Yucky pink hand soap loaded with suspected carcinogen Cocamide DEA, a suspected carcinogen? Not in a Teens Turning Green School!

You can also turn your teen on to Skin Deep, the Environmental Working Group’s amazing database of thousands of personal care products, and help them take control of the buying choices they make as they grow.

Last but not least, why not surprise them with a treat from Napa Valley Bath: all of our products are non-toxic, all-natural, pure and mostly organic.

Posted on October 15, 2009 - by Leslie Billera

Keep Truly Clean with 100% Organic

Last time, we profiled several synthetic ingredients found in ‘conventional’ bar and liquid soap including 1,4 Dioxane, Diethanolamine (DEA), Parabens: this is the stuff that’s supposed to keep us clean?

Maybe you’re thinking, ‘Not me! I use ‘organic’ beauty care products!’

It’s time to face the myth of organic when it comes to personal care products thanks to an unfortunate technique known as ‘greenwashing.’

Greenwashing is Just Plain Dirty

Slapping the word ‘organic’ onto a product is an addiction for big beauty manufacturers.

The sad truth is, it’s misused, abused and often completely wrong. The abuse is so egregious that the researchers the Environmental Working have created a special database to help consumers get a grip on what’s really green and healthy – and what’s not.

Using one drop of organic essential oil in a beauty product is one of the most common greenwashing techniques in the cosmetic industry.  Companies regularly get away with declaring their products organic as a whole, when in truth, only a small percentage is.

Other popular greenwashing terms that often come in tandem with ‘natural’ style packaging – include:

• Made with organic essential oils
• Contains organic ingredients
• Made with nontoxic ingredients
• 100% natural
• Essentially nontoxic
• Earth-friendly
• Environmentally Safer

Look closely at the ingredients list, be a vigilant shopper, and treat yourself to organic products that you can trust.

What is Organic, Really?

We know – it gets confusing. Here’s a simplified guide:

• The farmer or producer must avoid synthetic chemical additives, including fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, genetically modified organisms and sewage sludge

• Farmland must be free of chemicals for more than three years, depending on the country

• All the production stages must be transparent, open for audit and take part in frequent inspections

Next time we’ll give you an amazing recipe for a nutrient rich hair butter using two of our favorite organic ingredients: organic virgin olive oil and organic lavender essential oil!  After all, if you make it yourself, there’s no doubt what’s in it!

Posted on October 6, 2009 - by Leslie Billera

Hairway to Heaven: Two DIY Recipes

Your hair is the accessory you wear every day. So treat it right.

Forget pricey concoctions that contain chemical-laden fragrance, irritant-inducing parabens and endocrine disrupting octoxynol-9. Opt instead for ingredients you may already have in your kitchen cabinet.

Extra-virgin olive oil is very similar in composition to our sebum, which is our body’s natural oil. It absorbs readily, locking in moisture, and is especially effective for dry skin or hair. Plus, it’s rich in antioxidants.

Here are two DIY recipes: one is super quick, and the other a bit more complex. Use a combination of both and discover the power of your luxurious green locks!

Quick Hot Oil Treatment for Dry Hair

1. Put one-half cup of extra-virgin olive oil in a glass jar.

2. Run the closed jar under hot water for 30-60 seconds to heat the oil.

3. Open the jar and place a little olive oil on your palms and fingers

4. Massage gently through dry hair, paying special attention to your ends and any bristle portions.

5. Wrap your hair in plastic wrap or wear a shower cap for 15-30 minutes (or overnight for a more intense treatment)

6. Rinse out thoroughly in the shower with a gentle shampoo

Source: style, naturally, by Summer Rayne Oakes

Hair Butter Mask

Use daily before shampooing for maximum results. The below will last for one week of daily treatments.

3 tablespoons organic virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons avocado oil

2 tablespoons whole-wheat flour

1 teaspoon organic spirulina extract

10,000 IU vitamin E

2 drops lavender essential oil

2 drops bergamot essential oil

2 drops chamomile essential oil

1. Blend all ingredients in a small bowl, making sure the essential oils spread evenly.

2. Massage one tablespoon of the treatment into wet hair and scalp, concentrating on split ends and areas of itchiness. Leave on for ten minutes for intensive conditioning.

3. Rinse thoroughly and shampoo as usual.

Source: The Green Beauty Guide, by Julie Gabriel

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Jargon Alert:Extra Virgin Olive Oil

When olive oil is extra virgin, it means that the olives are only pressed once, oleic acid (a monostaturated fatty acid) content is under .8%, and there are no defects found in the taste of the oil.

Learn more about olive oil from our sister company St. Helena Olive Oil Co.