Make Up Your Face, Make Up Your Mind.

My recent days of theory and mature thinking brought me to browsing through a environmentally friendly blog, and then to something that made me completely change my views in something that most live for, about the ugly side of being beautiful.

With any normal standard of living, we're all consumers. Since most women like to shop, and shop we do, we have to have something that no matter who we are we agree on. Not all women like dresses, tanktops, or jewellery. But almost every female being with money in her hands will go out and purchase cosmetics. Face washes, scrubs, moisturizers, lipstick, mascara, magical creams and treatments that enhance and cover up our flaws and assets. While we're smearing on our daily sun protection or spritzing citrus perfume into the air, what we don't realize is everything that we're adding to ourselves is slowly breaking us down and toxifying what we are and will be. There's probably more chemicals, harmful ones or not, in your average makeup bag in a North American's stash than in our school science lab! We wear gloves and masks and aprons to work with those, using metal tongs and glass beakers, and here we are dipping our fingers and covering our faces with the very vile essences. I was taught formaldehyde was used to preserve dead bodies, not to cover clothing for a soft and clean finish!!!

Now, where do I come into the picture? I'm a teenage girl with interest in dressing up sometimes, so naturally I'll go to a store, pick up a tube of mascara that looks appealing or promising and purchase it. And then use it. Over and over until it's gone. Seems simplistic. But, one day I started to wonder, what do they put in those products that I so eagerly befriend and rely on? I did some research, and I left the webpage disgusted, and contemplating to TRASH every single piece of cosmetic toiletry I owned. The only exceptions were the organic, cruelty free, and natural items my mother had bought. Picked out from rows of over-commercialized tubes and plastic cancer containers that lured with promises of volume, sex appeal, and fullness. They have us on a tight leash, the cosmetics industry, and we don't even know it.

And then, there's Europe. While in North America we're powdering ourselves to our demise, our friends and my relatives can buy the same product and have no worries about side effects or poisons in their system. It seems ridiculous and all I could utter was... why? It turns out that Europe has strict regulations for all cosmetics and products meant for human use. Anything considered a carcinogen or harmful is banned on the spot, and taken out of use immediately. A database of chemicals commonly found in cosmetics also had a very interesting fact in the point that it said in America, there is a grand total of 10 chemicals banned from use in personal care products. In Europe there is over 1,100! A real eye opener and shocker. Isn't the point of testing and making products to have them be SAFE and effective? Because no matter how ignorant they take us for being, someone will find out and make a change.

So I joined a few of these websites and campaigns and signed up for newsletters informing me of how things were going along. For now, their focus is personal care products, but the stretch of disgusting chemicals and toxins spreads to toys, accessories, clothing, even the air we breathe is contaminated. Mercury, nano particles, phtalates (guaranteed to turn your baby boys into baby girls), petrochemicals, lead acetate (completely safe, of couurse), hydroquinine, and wait... does that say... placenta? Ew. I'd rather have never found out and kept myself in the area of mindless brainwashing I was in earlier. I know where I'm doing my make up shopping from now on, good old heavy metal toxic waste free Europe. Because I can buy the same name brand make up for half the price, and less than 95% of the chemicals. A bargain in the consideration of your life.

Use daily shouldn't be dangerous advice. So next time, before you push the trigger on that bottle, think. It won't be a gunshot, but a slow and painful death of mutation and sickness. Still want to wear any given lipstick? I salute you, and hope one day, maybe, you'll learn, like I did.