Out With The Old and In With The New: Give Your Bathroom Cabinet a Makeover

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(This is the first of three parts, originally published in January 2007, back by popular demand).

The New Year is a time of renewal — looking ahead, visualizing, and anticipating positive changes and developments for ourselves
year to come. This time-honored tradition takes on many forms: new year’s resolutions to lose weight, get fit, stop smoking, find ways to reduce stress in our busy lives; give away or recycle old possessions that have outlived their usefulness; and clear out all manner of clutter to make room for new and better things.    

If you’ve resolved to take better care of yourself this year and be healthier, there’s never been a better time to give the medicine cabinet in your bathroom a New Year’s Makeover. I’d like to encourage you to take a closer look at what’s inside yours. Even the most seemingly innocuous items can contain a veritable of soup of chemicals that may be doing you more harm than good.

Read the labels and familiarize yourself with the ingredients. Start with the products you use daily –toothpaste, mouthwash, antiperspirants or deodorants, talcum powder, face creams, lotions, and cleansers, over-the-counter cold and pain medications, “anti-bacterial” soaps, and traditional cosmetics. After all, these are products you routinely apply to your skin or your teeth and gums –both the fastest routes for substances to be absorbed into the bloodstream. When substances are absorbed into the body this way they often by-pass the liver — your body’s principle detoxifying organ– or worse, clog and congest it.  That means many toxic substances aren’t properly eliminated and often take up residence in the fatty tissue of our organs where they build up over time, turning into a virtual “thorn in your side” that can compromise your immune system and leave you susceptible to a host of health problems.  A congested liver is also one of the fastest routes to inflammation in the body.

Ironically, many of the chemical ingredients in personal care products are there to improve the texture and consistency, appearance, or shelf-life stability of the product and have no functional purpose. To add insult to injury, many are primarily there to speed up or enhance the penetration of the other ingredients into the skin; increase the thickness and intensity of the lather (making it harder to rinse off); or make the product more visually appealing.

Eliminating products made with ingredients that are at worst, toxic and potentially harmful to your health, and at best, irritants or allergens that do not serve you on your path to more healthful living, will greatly reduce your risk of exposure and may even rid you of persistent unexplained health problems. Coincidentally (or maybe not so coincidentally), many of the ingredients that are harmful to you, are also harmful to the environment, both on the manufacturing and production side and on the back-end as they make their way down toilets and drains and into our riverbeds and streams altering the ecological landscape.

Personally, I can’t think of a better way to start the New Year than by greening your personal care routine! I’ve put together a 2-part guideline for ingredients and products to avoid or eliminate from your bathroom cabinet (and your life), along with some suggestions for healthier, safer alternatives to replace them. The Part 1 covers toothpastes,  mouthwashes, deodorants, and Over-The-Counter (OTC) medications. Part 2 covers basic body care products like lotions, creams, liquid hand soaps, and for women, make-up.

Part 1

Part 2