Curious if you are using toxic makeup products? Any makeup or beauty products can have toxic ingredients in them. From your mascara, lip liner, foundation, setting spray, nail polish, and all that good ～glam～ stuff can actually be harmful. I want to make it easy for you to be sure that every product that goes onto your skin is clean and nourishing. These two free apps are all you need to quickly find out if your skincare and makeup products are toxic.
I’m sure that if you’re reading this, you are just as surprised and stunned as I was when I first started to learn about clean beauty. It’s a bit shocking to realize that the products you’ve used for YEARS are chock a block full of nasty ingredients and chemicals that are bad for you. ☹
I’m here to help you find the easiest ways to find out if your makeup products are toxic and have chemicals in them! Read on, gals and gents, and learn how to check all of your beloved beauty items!
The Holy Grail Apps to find toxic makeup products and switch to Clean Beauty:
Think Dirty
Okay y’all, this is one of my fav apps to use. I like it so much that it’s on my home screen. Which in my book means it’s pretty important and I use it on the regular.
To begin, this is a free app that just requires you to create a beauty profile to access their database. It’s actually handy to create a profile because you can add beauty products you actually use to your “My Bathroom Shelf.” This helps you easily access, sort, and get a realistic idea of what you own and use daily. (Plus, the screen actually looks like mini bathroom shelves, so it’s super cute)
Once in the app, you can search for your makeup products in a breeze. My preferred way to quickly find a specific product is by using their barcode scanning feature. To do this, just pick up your makeup or beauty product, locate the barcode (this oftentimes is on the packaging, not the actual product container), and scan.
1,2,3 and all of the product info is there!
If you want to manually type in the product name, you can do so using the “search” bar at the top of the page.
The Coolest Feature of the Think Dirty App is The Rating Scale
When you find the product you’re looking for, give it a click to view the ingredients ranked from most toxic to least toxic. Each ingredient is clickable and has many important features. Here’s a breakdown of the features:
1st. “Name” – The name of the ingredient in the product comes up.
2nd. “Also Known As” – This feature is amazing because it lists all of the other names this ingredient can use. Often times one ingredient can have four of five names, so this exposes what its aliases are. *This is always important to be aware of because if you know XY chemical is bad for you, you need to know it is the same as XYZ chemical”
3rd. “Usage” – Shares details of what exactly the ingredients common use is. It will surprise you that some “clean” products have fillers, chemicals, and other unmentionables *queue Damian from Mean Girls wink GIF here*.
4th. “Health Impacts” – Tells you every health impact this ingredient is known or suspected to cause.
5th. “Explanation” – Informs you as to why it’s considered harmful and/or toxic, along with specifics from references such as the FDA. This is usually about a paragraph or so long. It contains useful background to support the reason for the rank.
6th. “Sources” – Links to resources are here. This is almost like when you were in school and wrote a works cited page. The sources are hyperlinked and will take you directly to the research study to learn more.
7th. “Warnings From Regulatory Agencies:” – Similar to the above, this provides really credible and important links to warnings. For example, these warnings might come from an Environment Group, The California Department of Public Health, etc.
All of this important information is so useful! Seriously, the amount you can learn from a quick scan is amazing.
Now that you know what every feature is under each ingredient, you need to know the strategic placement of the ingredients. The ingredient list is in a numerical category from most toxic (red color) to least toxic (green color).
The breakdown of the ranking scale:
10-8: Dirty (Red)
7-4: Half n’ half (Orange)
3-1: Clean (Green)
Hokay, so onto the next amazing app to check if your makeup products are toxic.
EWG Skin Deep
The EWG stands for the Environmental Working Group. Let me say how amazing the website and app are. For beauty lovers specifically, there is a subsection called EWG’s Skin Deep. This subsection has been around since 2004 and is a gigantic database of cosmetic product ingredients. In terms of apps, this is my second favorite to find toxic makeup products quickly.
The app works similarly to Think Dirty. You can search for a product or use the scan feature to pull up all the juicy information. My favorite part is that you can see the product’s rank by pie charts. This is awesome for us visual learners. First, it shows for “Allergy Concern,” “Cancer Concern,” and “Developmental Concern.” The graph’s rank system goes from green, yellow to red to make it easy to quickly understand the product’s score.
Next, ingredients show up in the color codes from above. That means that thee app starts with the most toxic makeup ingredient to the cleanest. You can click each ingredient for a complete breakdown of data. For instance, concerns, synonyms, data sources, etc. are all included. Plus, this breakdown includes it’s own mini pie charts (so cute and helpful).
Ah, there you have it! These two apps for toxic makeup products will seriously change the game. They will give you an easy transition from your toxic makeup and skincare products to safe alternatives. Oh, how wonderful it feels to know your beauty and makeup products are clean!
By the way, if you live in New York City (or are there for a visit) you HAVE to check out these incredible non-toxic beauty stores. I promise you won’t ever want to shop anywhere else for clean makeup and skincare products.
So, are you going to make the switch? I’d love to hear if you were as shocked as me and which one beauty product you are absolutely going to stop using!
Let me know in the comments below so we can chat.
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