Why I Quit Using Toxic Skincare

Fifteen years ago I decided to quit using toxic skincare products on myself after a few health scares.

I’d played with the idea of eating organic and using non toxic products several times but had never quite embraced it fully.  What emerged as just another false promise to myself, i thought was too hard to do.  Then one day I decided to get serious.

Giving up traditional beauty products was not as difficult as I thought it would be. In fact, I actually felt a lot better, so I just kept going and going.

Ever since then I’ve been gathering facts about the beauty industry that have amazed and shocked me.

I began diving into more information about health, wellness and natural beauty in 2013 when i became a mother for the first time. The first time i held my baby in my arms i vowed to her to protect, and love her unconditionally and thats when my warrior mum kicked in and started changing everything harmful in our lives. As I probed deeper with my research, I realised a lot of information regarding the hidden dangers lurking in beauty products weren’t widely publicised.

Creating products to make us look and feel more attractive, desirable and beautiful has a big, ugly price tag. From the decimation of forests and the cruel practice of animal testing, to the hundreds of thousands of toxic chemicals contained in cosmetics that have never been tested for health and safety on humans, the beauty industry has a lot to answer for.

We know that asbestos, radiation and tobacco are carcinogenic and that formaldehyde is used to preserve corpses. We blatantly avoid them. Yet, when it comes to personal care products, fragrances and cosmetics that are filled with hazardous chemicals that have serious health implications.

In the name of beauty, natural regimes passed on by our grandmothers have been surpassed by chemical-laden concoctions filled with promises of clear skin and a resurrection of our youth. We inhale them, rub them on our skin and ingest them from our lips. We wash our hair in them, brush our teeth with them, spray them on our wrists and neck and unwittingly breathe in toxic, fragrance bombs in enclosed, unventilated spaces.

Up to 80% of chemicals used in cosmetics have not been rigorously tested. That’s without taking into consideration what happens when they’re mixed together in a chemical cocktail and applied to our bodies. Alarmingly, the long-term effects of dousing ourselves in hazardous chemicals aren’t widely known. That’s because they’re minimised, shrouded in secrecy and generally kept under wraps by the companies that produce them.

Constant visual reminders on social media encourage us to make sustainable changes to our lifestyles, diets and exercise regimes. We biohack ways to extend our lives and become efficiency machines. We regularly move our bodies, buy healthy cookbooks, read the labels on food products and analyse the nutrition panels. Yet, few of us vigilantly scrutinise the labels of the personal care products and cosmetics we use daily.

It’s a balancing act, after all. We want to look, feel and smell wonderful. We want high performance, functional products that deliver results: mascara that sticks to our lashes, red, voluminous, kissable lips, and contouring that gives us a youthful, luminescent pop when randomly snapped for an Instagram upload. Yet, many of us turn a blind eye to toxic ingredients in pursuit of our beauty goals.

We are unwittingly part of an experiment that may be costing us our health and shortening our lives.

Taking inventory of every personal care and cosmetic product and deciphering all the potentially toxic cosmetic ingredients can seem like an overwhelming and daunting task. Most of us have hectic schedules and limited time to sleuth the interwebs for the correct information.

Why should we bother to switch anyway? We can’t live in a bubble and we’ve been using the same old goop for years without any adverse side effects.

Well I'll tell you why: through the process of educating ourselves and making small changes, we can make a difference to our health and to the planet. It’s a choice. And a matter of committing. These things always are.

I believe that switching to non-toxic beauty can be easily and simply implemented into a daily routine. But it’s up to each one of us to determine which cosmetic ingredients are too toxic to risk exposing to our families and ourselves.

If this post resonates with you then you should check out my Organic Skincare Collection. It took me 2 years to create each product and it’s a step towards making better choices:  https://www.meekabody.com/collections/shop

It incorporates an excellent combination of active peptides, age defying native Australian plant extracts, lots of healthy vitamins and a truckload of essential fatty acids all in a certified organic base. Every ingredient is a wonderful key ACTIVE ingredient that does something magical.

I’ve been truly overwhelmed by the stories of my customers who swear by my collection. I’ve kept a record of all these testimonies and share them through my ig  https://www.instagram.com/meekabody/?hl=en so check them out and if you buy the collection, please let me know what you think. You’re feedback means the world to me.