6 Ways To Make Your Skincare Sustainable

For the majority of us, our beauty ritual is something we can’t go a day without. It’s become deeply ingrained in our daily lives and something we oftentimes don’t realize how impactful it is on the environment. Using organic skincare products with better ingredients is not the only sustainable switch for our beauty rituals.

Many other factors in our ritual and other ways we live every day make a bigger effect on our environment. The list goes on from the packaging of our household or cosmetics products, the way we clean our dishes, or how many unsustainable animal products we consume.

We aren’t aware of the consumption of cosmetics and personal care products have on our beautiful planet. The product that goes down the drain or thrown in the trash poison the environment with its toxic chemicals and plastic; killing the coral reefs, wildlife, rainforests, and so on.

It seems hard to be sustainable in an industry filled with plastic that people are willing to buy because it seems ‘cheaper’ than being green, but in reality, the cost is much bigger than just the price tag. There are plenty of alternatives we can add to our beauty rituals and lives that will greatly help the earth instead of trashing it.

Follow these six simple and affordable switches to be a more sustainable consumer

Be Conscious of the Packaging

Numerous brands use biodegradable and eco-friendly packaging compared to more plastic packaging contributing to plastic pollution. Many brands make it easy to even use refillable packaging for your products or not packaging at all by using solid beauty bars of shampoo, conditioner, facial cleanser, etc. In recent years, more pressure has been put on companies to become more sustainable due to the rapid effects of climate change and global warming. From this came a rise in eco-friendly, zero-waste beauty companies - using recycled materials for packaging, biodegradable packaging, and non-harmful organic ingredients.

Recycle Used Skincare

If you still have glass or plastic packaging, don’t throw these away - instead, recycle! To recycle properly, ensure that the package or container is empty and clean before throwing them in the bin as any leftover residue can contaminate other recyclables. If there is a lid or pump, these will need to be removed. Another alternative to throwing it in the recycling bin is using it for a DIY project for a different purpose in your home! Try using it as a makeup brush holder, travel container, or maybe even a plant pot. There are limitless alternatives to just throwing them in the trash.

Use Reusable Items

Another big contributor to climate change is the process of making cotton products. It takes 101 gallons of water to produce just one pound of cotton with eight of the top ten pesticides used in the production of cotton are classified as highly hazardous. It’s time to ditch the cotton products like cotton rounds or cotton swabs and instead switch to more biodegradable eco-friendly alternatives for applying skincare products. Just think of how many cotton swabs or rounds you go through in just a week - then just imagine how much water and chemical had gone into making just one package. Instead, try switching to organic cotton pads and bamboo cotton swabs rather than plastic as these are better for our environment. Organic cotton is produced using natural seeds with no pesticides or harmful chemicals.

If you want to save money and cut off cotton completely, try using reusable pads. Reusable cotton rounds are way more accessible now, usually coming in a set of multiple pads. You can simply place them in the wash with your clothes and lay them out to dry. This way you’ll end up saving more money from avoiding buying disposable cotton rounds every few weeks. Cotton rounds aren’t the only products with an alternative; you can replace your hairbrush, toothbrush, makeup brushes, and other items with bamboo brushes.

Bamboo is compostable and biodegradable and grows around 3.5 ft per day making it perfect to switch out your plastic items with - plus they are very durable and don’t break the bank! It’s also time to retire the makeup wipes. Not only are they bad for your skin, but they don’t biodegrade and eventually make their way into the ocean where they get ingested by sea creatures and eventually die. If they end up in the landfill, the toxic chemicals used to make these wipes seep into the soil and poison the earth.

Declutter Your Skincare Collection

Decluttering your skincare drawer or cabinet goes hand in hand with recycling old products. Many of us tend to test out so many different skincare products only to discover it doesn’t work for our skin. This leads to tons of unused products just sitting in our bathrooms making them cluttered with more expiring products than the ones we use. Take a day to go through your skincare collection and decide what products you use most often and the ones that you need to be recycled. Don’t throw these products in the trash, as said earlier, clean these packages out and recycle them in the bin or for different use. Not only will you be helping the planet but your beauty rituals will feel calmer in decluttered space.

Turn Off the Tap

When we wash our face or brush our teeth we tend to leave the sink running out of habit. We don’t need to be leaving the water on while we’re doing other things. The simplest thing to do here is turn off the water if you’re not using it. This goes for showers as well - where ten-minute showers use between 20-25 gallons of water, so try not to go longer than ten minutes. Taking longer showers negatively affects the environment because of excessive water and energy consumption. Each gallon of water (2-2.5 gallons per minute) contributes to the depletion and pollution of groundwater tables, and the energy used increases greenhouse gas emissions.

Choose Organic Ingredients

The rise of companies attempting to be more sustainable also brings about the use of the word ‘natural’ to make their brand appear to be more sustainable. However, these “natural” products are often made with other chemicals and toxic ingredients. When actual natural ingredients are used have increased demand at an unsustainable level. This means more farming and mining to supply these demands - this isn’t done sustainably as big companies don’t care how it’s done, but how fast it can be made at the cheapest price. Avoid all products marketed as ‘natural’ because this is where they’ll trick you - it may be natural ingredients involved but in no way does it positively affect our environment, it simply contributes to the harm.

Instead, choose companies that use higher amounts of organic ingredients or wild-crafted ingredients in the products. If you’re not sure what wild-crafted ingredients are, they are typically naturally grown ingredients; such as dandelions, chamomile, goji berries, and sage. It’ll help to also look into how these companies source their organic ingredients.

Lastly, we need to take a look at our sunscreen ingredients. The most common chemical used in sunscreens, ‘Oxybenzone’, protects our skin from the sun but negatively impacts our coral reefs. These ingredients from our sunscreen wash off in the ocean or down the drain eventually making their way into the ocean. Oxybenzone damages the coral’s DNA and hinders the reproduction and growth of young coral. Why is this important? Coral reefs house diverse ecosystems that provide habitat and food for numerous marine organisms. We need to keep them alive.