Want to make living green look good — by looking good? A new book by two cool green girls promises to hottify you, eco-style. Pick up No More Dirty Looks: The Truth about Your Beauty Products–and the Ultimate Guide to Safe and Clean Cosmetics, and you’ll learn that the first step to good clean natural beauty is ditching the dirty “beauty” products that are ugging up your look.
Written by GOOD magazine features editor Siobhan O’Connor and L.A. journalist Alexandra Spunt, No More Dirty Looks seeks to turn the beauty seekers into eco thinkers. This book isn’t about scaring you so much about chemicals in your makeup bag that you end up embracing a frizzy-haired, patchouli-scented hippie look (not that there’s anything wrong with frizz or patchouli). Instead, No More Dirty Looks is about looking better by making better beauty choices.
After all, we all know know the many unfortunate foibles of less-than-natural beauty remedies. Health issues aside, anyone who’s ended up with an orangey-looking tan, brittle yellowish nails or over-processed damaged hair knows expensive chemical-laden products can create more beauty problems than they solve. In fact, No More Dirty Looks begins with the authors getting Brazilian blowouts — that looked good briefly but ended badly.
“The shine had gone matte, our ends were decimated, and we had crowns of flyaways that were most certainly not there before.” That $400 treatment-gone-wrong got the girls investigating. The two soon learned about a woman who’d died from getting this toxic, formaldehyde-filled hair treatment!
No More Dirty Looks does go through a scary laundry list of reasons why you should avoid the nasty, chemical-filled stuff — and how hard it is to do just that. Thanks to lax laws, the FDA has very little power to regulate the beauty industry — which means many potentially dangerous ingredients are allowed to be used. Worse, some of these scary chemicals aren’t even listed on the ingredient lists! Formaldehyde‘s disguised under monikers like cormalin and methyl aldehyde, 1,4-dioxane escapes mention via a loophole because the carcinogen’s considered a byproduct exempt from listing requirements, and all sorts of chemicals can remain anonymous under the one-word ingredient “fragrance.”
To add insult to injury, many of these dangerous “beauty” products don’t actually make you look good — especially not in the long term. Want lighter skin? Hydroquine can give you that — along with bluish-black lesions. Pretty nails? Toulene in your polish has you covered, until the chemical makes your nails turn brittle and break off. Sweat-free pits? Aluminum will keep you dry as a robot — and decorate your white T-shirts with yellow stains.
After a couple chapters detailing the dirty side of conventional “beauty,” No More Dirty Looks shows you how you can stop sabotaging your looks and health by making smarter, prettier, greener decisions. Each chapter tackles a beauty topic — starting with your hair — and shows you what’s wrong with conventional habits and how to change your ways. The advice of course includes picking better-for-you products — along with recommendations for specific tried-and-true green beauty elixirs — but also goes beyond ingredient lists to suggest changing up your beauty routine altogether.
The suggestions range from the minor — like Siobhan’s decision to get fewer highlights — to the extreme, like Alexandra’s choice to stop washing her hair. Yes, you read that right — not “washing her hair less” or “washing her hair with baking soda instead of shampoo.” Alexandra stopped washing her hair — period — and says “dirty has started to feel like the new clean.” Her hair looks pretty to me, at least in the press photo below! (Siobhan left, Alexandra right)
I especially loved No More Dirty Looks‘ chapters on changing up your diet and your life — because what we eat, what we do, and what we think generally affects our looks a whole lot more than what we simply put on our bodies. Pick up No More Dirty Looks to get the full range of beauty tips, from the truly hippie (cheap DIY tricks that could leave you looking prettier than ever!) to the extravagantly eco-luxe (high-end green brand products that are eco, effective, and expensive!). The paperback costs $14.95.
Earlier: The Story of Cosmetics: What toxic chemicals lurk in your shampoo?
Photo by Carolina Crespo via nomoredirtylooks.com
Thanks for the great book tip. I love GOOD,and chances are I’ll love this eco-beauty advice. In San Diego, Pam Nigro’s Eco Salon is a great choice…
Sally´s last blog ..la maestra urban garden
Comment by Sally — August 27, 2010 @ 2:54 pm
Definitely intested in checking this book out. I highly doubt I’ll stop washing my hair though. Alexandra’s lucky she can! I’ve gone a week without washing mine (trips, camping) and well, there’s something to be said about a clean scalp.
Comment by jeannie — August 27, 2010 @ 4:30 pm
You keep using the word “chemical”, but I don’t think that’s the word you actually want. Water, for example, is a chemical. Do you perhaps mean “industrial chemicals?”
I know it seems like I’m picking a nit, but saying “chemicals are bad” is a bit like saying “matter is bad.”
peterb´s last blog ..Sherlock for iPhone
Comment by peterb — August 28, 2010 @ 5:56 am
I love play on words in the title. Very clever!
Scarlet´s last blog ..Autumn Gardening
Comment by Scarlet — August 29, 2010 @ 7:57 pm
When it comes to the alleged toxicity of perfumes and fragrances, there’s nothing worse than non-scientists eschewing readily-available scientific research in favor of garbage found on the internet, publishing their “findings” in a book, and metastasizing their contaminated thinking across millions of readers/
The logic presented in this book is an intellectual bubonic plague — spreading fear and misunderstanding about something they know very little about.
This is scare science — that blend of fantasy, confusion, cancerphobia, and intellectual laziness.
The International Fragrance Association (IFRA) Code of Practice is a comprehensive self-regulating protocol, augmented by independent third-party compliance testing.
Before any fragrance reaches market, it is created from a selection of 3000 ingredients — natural and synthetic — all published earlier this year to demonstrate the industry’s transparency. The materials are reviewed by the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM). RIFM prepares a comprehensive report on the materials from existing safety data, requires missing data to be provided, and issues recommendations for the materials’ safe usage. This includes analysis of the concentration and volume of each ingredient, even for those in which no data exists.
Although the RIFM is funded by the fragrance industry, the methodology it uses to determine safety is completely transparent, with four separate scientific papers detailing these processes — none of which have ever been challenged by any credible authority. Furthermore, once RIFM publishes this data, it is then peer-reviewed by non-RIFM scientists regarding the scientific protocols used, the results, recommendations, and anything that might have been missed.
Finally, a third-party compliance administrator, Eurofins Scientific, randomly selects products each year, analyzes their composition, and determines if the formulation is in compliance with IFRA’s standards.
Easily-duped readers would believe that no safety protocols exist, as the authors state, “…No independent authority…monitors what cosmetic companies put in our products…it’s done almost exclusively by the cosmetics companies themselves. It’s a [woefully inadequate] system, allowing for widespread use of some pretty questionable substances”.
Given the protocols that exist, does anyone wonder if the authors really performed their journalistic due diligence? If the system is inadequate, why have 80 fragrance ingredients have been prohibited from being put into any product, and 83 restricted?
Could the authors’ lack of scientific expertise be why their blog contains illogical rants lacking evidentiary support, previously-debunked blatherings about BPA, and frequent mentions of the insidious Environmental Working Group? Perhaps that’s why they cheer on the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, producer of clever animated videos solely designed to scare consumers out of their wits.
I don’t think the authors have malicious intent. They are regular folks susceptible to fears we all share about what we consume, thanks to previous health scares (most of them debunked). Yes, they’re right that mankind doesn’t have data on 20-30% of fragrance ingredients, but they insist on their toxicity by saying the system in place, “doesn’t guarantee your safety”. Of course it doesn’t! No system guarantees our safety! Cars aren’t safe. Neither are planes. Neither is fast food. Nor are open umbrellas waved around in lightning storms.
The authors themselves quote Dr. Joseph A. Schwarcz who, when “pressed” about the “possible consequences of long-term exposure to such a wide variety of chemicals and combinations, said, ‘Those are very reasonable questions to ask for which it is virtually impossible to provide answers”.
Duh. Everything might possibly kill you over the long term. If I walk around in open fields with an umbrella during thunderstorms every chance I get, I’ll eventually get struck by lightning. If I inject 200 gallons of formaldehyde into my body, I’m going to die. The dose makes the poison.
The problem is that the authors suggest you are taking fatal risks spritzing yourself with perfume. That’s just not rational. It’s not fair. And it’s just plain wrong.
Comment by Lawrence Meyers — September 20, 2010 @ 12:38 am