Quasilaur’s Blog

A couple of weeks after I swore off purchasing toner, and a week after I ran out of my trusty Aveda toner, my skin broke out. Was it the cause of no-toning? I highly doubt this, and instead attribute it to a hormonal flux. However, my skin felt greasy and unhappy, and going for the emotional need vs. physical need, I bought Earth Science Clarifying Herbal Astringent. I chose this toner after looking at a whole host of options, with price being a concern, and recognition of ingredients being the other. Drug store options were right out (aside from the standard Witch Hazel, which is available not in the cosmetic section, but in first aid.) I ended up going into PCC (a local food coop) and looking at the familiar bottles of “natural” potions. I wanted to avoid alcohol in my toner/astringent, so that put some of the more natural of the natural right out. I remembered liking Earth Science in the past, and I found it included vinegar, which a previous commenter had recommended. I was sold with these ingredients:

Purified Water, Witch Hazel Extract, Glycerin (vegetable), Apple Cider Vinegar, Sage Extract, Rosemary Extract, Horsetail Extract, Cucumber Extract, Sea Kelp Extract, Peppermint Extract, Panthenol, Sulfur, Camphor, Sodium PCA, Zinc Sulfate. Sorbic Acid, Grapefruit Seed Extract, Allantoin, Hyaluronic Acid, Ascorbic Acid, Fragrance, Cellulose Gum, Annatto Extract.

I find the toner to be refreshing - which is just NICE sometimes. Also, it doesn’t seem to have done my skin any harm, which is also a plus.

In my brief Google searches, I haven’t found where Earth Sciences (or it’s parent, Earth Essentials, Inc) come from, other than perhaps California. Perhaps it is in the same category as Kiss My Face — relatively harmless face and body care, small company, American based, etc. I’ll continue to look.

About two years ago I started buying toner to round out my face-washing regimen. I was working in Whole Body at Whole Foods and I got a freebie of Zia toner, and figured it was a good idea. Afterall, it’s supposed to prime your face for moisturizer.

In my recent mood for scaling down consumption (and waste), I started pondering my use of toner. I’ve been using Aveda toner for the past two years, and I like the smell, and it’s a refreshing spritz. However, the ingredients make me wonder just why I bother. Alcohol, essential oils, water, some unpronouncable chemicals that I’m sure are to make me more youthful. Why bother?

Ashes, a human I was acquainted with years ago, had the most lovely hair I could imagine. It was red, curly and long. Ashes told me that s/he didn’t use shampoo and conditioner. Afterall, shampoo just strips your hair of natural oils, and conditioner just replaces them. What a racket! Jon posited that toner sets the stage for moisturizer by further drying your face. Huh, it just kind of makes sense, especially with the alcohol content.

A spritz of toner is refreshing, but is it worth the wasted packaging and the shipping costs of a product that is mostly water?

I’ve decided for now to give up my toner. It’s $20 I save, along with packaging.

In other related news — I’ve found a local mineral make-up company, Terra Firma Cosmetics. I haven’t tried it on my face yet, but it’s something to look into — if I don’t give up make-up altogether. I’m also ecstatic to find B & Lu, a plus-sized clothing retailer that lists many clothes, if not all, as being made in the USA. I dig that. I’m also learning to love the hunt for good clothing in thrift stores.

For Memorial Day Weekend, I invite you, my two (maybe three) readers to influence your friends (and take upon yourselves) to buy American.

The reason I ask this is to raise consciousness of just how much America is dependent on other countries for every aspect of our daily lives. I’ve been doing this the past couple weeks, primarily with products I was interested in purchasing.

Think about how many miles the ingredients traveled. Think of the energy involved in that transport. Think about the NEED for that product versus the DESIRE. What are the conditions of the workers who manufacture these products? How much of the product is dependent on corn, soy or petroleum for its existence?

Speaking of corn and other fillers — I looked briefly at some drug store make-up that is following the “mineral” make-up trend. The options are at least half the price of the infomercially popular Bare Minerals, but contain talc and corn starch as fillers, along with FD&C colors for pigment.

And in other consumer news: Though I vanpool the total 90 miles to and from work every day, I still fill the gas tank of our car, which requires premium only. I filled the tank on Thursday to the tune of $52.66.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

I try to blog weekly, but last week my project turned out to be a tad too ambitious. I had planned to continue to lay out the horrible truths of how we’ve all been tricked into consuming more of the same thing despite ourselves. It turns out that the horrible truths I was going to shed light on are far too numerous for one blog post.

I have become increasingly aware as to how much we DON’T know about the products we purchase. Hopefully, this would have become apparent last year with the e. coli spinach, or at least this year with the melamine infused cat food from China. The problem is far greater than our food supply. Try doing your normal shopping and ONLY buying products stating “Made in the USA” — food included? Then, see how many of your commonly purchased items come from China and consider what your dollars might be going into, such as prison labor (political prisoners, even!), sweatshop conditions and toxic waste in the Chinese countryside. The whole task gets even more difficult when you’re looking at items that have more than one major ingredient. This is what makes supplements and body care so hard to digest into the two words, “good” and “bad.” It’s not just about the end product, where it’s made or how far it’s shipped. Nor is it as simple as the labels, vegan, biodegradable, not tested on animals, organic and natural.
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Deliberate Consumption is my new favorite thing. So much my new favorite thing, that it really is the only topic I want to write about on this blog these days.

What I mean when I say “deliberate consumption” is that my intention for myself is to make deliberate, careful choices about what I consume. From just what I see in print advertising and total real-estate of shopping institutions, I would say that my demographic (nearly 30, femme, white, middle class woman) is probably the most sought after for dollars. I may be overgeneralizing, and certainly have no facts to back this up, just my own observation, which being a nearly 30, femme, white , middle class woman may be scewed towards what I notice and take interest in. I’m trying desperately to overcome the idea that I “need” something, and figure out where these desires come from, and what the product I’m desiring really does for me.
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This is another Femme post. I hate to be stereotypically anything, but I do love my chocolate, shoes, handbags and skin care products. My husband and I frequently discuss our slow creeping moves towards more sustainable living through our food and food-shopping choices. This has gotten me thinking more about the other products I consume daily and how they impact our world.

Everything is a trade-off. The vegan who chooses to not wear leather and to eat a primarily soy, wheat and corn based diet inevitably supports the use of petrochemicals through the making of plastics (can’t use plastics made from caseine!) used in packaging, clothing and shoes and through the use of petrochemicals as fertilizers for all those non-animal foods. The aim is to really make the best, most informed decisions with the least amount damage total.
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This is going to be one of those femme posts. Seven years ago, I swore off make-up, cut my hair short (well, my friend Allida actually did the honors) dyed it aqua and declared my independence. Now my hair is an unnatural red, to my shoulders (with bangs!) and during work days, I do not go out without make-up. Not only that, but after starting out my adulthood with a chain-wallet, I now carry a designer purse. In this post, I will tell you what a few of my favorite femme things are!
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The internet is great for continuing to procrastinate writing NaNoWriMo related stuff. Most recently I’ve been researching skin care products for these annoying dry patches I get on my face and body during the winter. Part of me wonders if it’s like a mild eczema, though I doubt it’s anything more than flakey, dry skin.

Years of working at Whole Foods Market (mostly during grad school) has made me more aware of the contents of my food, cleaning and bodycare products. It’s a snobbery that is almost warranted at some times, given that there is a LOT of crap in everyday products that are either unneccesary, possibly toxic, and at other times, just gross. (Have you even SEEN the guacamole dip sold in the cold case at some of the large grocery chains? Look for the avacado content. Shudder when you realize it’s not there, or at the end of the list, under sour cream and a whole bunch of hydrolyzed, autolyzed and otherwise manipulated contents.) It’s not so much that I fear death or cancer at the hands of these products, but feel rather that if guacamole can be made at home using 5-8 ingredients, mostly containing avacado, then why make it out of mostly sour cream and a few dozen other things. Beyond that, it would be nice to be able to not only purchase less-toxic products, but also products that come from sustainable sources. When it gets down to the nitty-gritty, I’ve started to have a real distaste for the artificial and now prefer the real thing.

Body care is a special issue, though, when it comes to natural and organic products. There is no FDA standard or regulation that specifies what the words “natural” and “organic” mean with body care. They definitely mean something for foods, but you can seriously make a product that’s chock-full of synthetic detergents, artificial colors and fragrances, and maybe throw in some organic aloe vera and organic lavander and call your product “Organic Spring Shampoo” or whatever you want to call it. This means if you actually care about the contents of your bodycare products, you must read labels and not go by flashy packaging or ad copy. Then you have to have some sense of organic chemistry and the taxonomy of herbs to decipher what’s naturally derived and what’s synthetically produced. Yay! The end result is that in a normal grocery/drug store you might be lucky to find one brand that is actually as organic and natural as it claims. Here in the Northwest, Burt’s Bees is happily ubiquitous in the regular stores. Not so, I’m sure, in middle America.

Natural bodycare, of course, beyond being hard to find, is costly. And lucky for me, last winter I got hooked on products by evanhealy which I purchased in Chicago. They were rather pricey, though, and required me to order them online… so I used it up and tried to find better options. Since then, I’ve tried Better Botanicals semi-Ayurvedic based face care and have been relatively unimpressed. I’ve also tried MyChelle, which has GREAT cleansers and a fabulous exfoliant and night creme, but doesn’t really have a day cream that I really love.

The only thing I remember liking, and pretty much using up, was the TimeWise cleanser and lotion by Mary Kay which I had bought from a coworker while I was interning for my MSW in Chicago. Hardly a bastion of natural skin care, it did leave my skin feeling pretty nice and hydrated without feeling weighted down by thick emollients.

I keep thinking that if I’m going to go the Mary Kay route, I should just use up the UV-protecting, Sensitive Formula Oil of Olay that I bought for BurningMan 2K4. I can’t bring myself to do it, though, and I’m not sure why.

Tonight I will be turning in two free coupons for free swag at the local Aveda store. Aveda, along with The Body Shop, have long promoted a natural, sometimes organic, cruelty free and/or earth-friendly facade for their bodycare products. Through the years, though, I’ve found some of their products hard to distinguish from the contents of other supermarket bodycare. Maybe the plus is that they’re done w/ more sensitivity to the environment, or maybe they provide better paying jobs from some of the less industrialized countries that they get their materials from, maybe they offer their employees a 401-K and stock options. It’s really hard to know what is marketing, what is actually doing some good and what is just poisoning the earth like every other corporation (unavoidable in some cases, but at least let’s be upfront about it.)

Tonight I will see what Aveda, and possibly also the Body Shop (or one of the other mall bodycare specialty shops) has to offer for my fickle, no-nonsense, just wash-and-moisturize-me skin.

And now… back to attempting to write fiction.

* One last thing - I’m also shopping for less-toxic toxic-mold killing cleaning products. I’m tempted to just dilute bleach and say to hell w/ it, but I really want a better option.