CosmEthics – Putting the Ethics into Cosmetics

These days, more than ever, we look at the products that we eat to see exactly what we are putting into our bodies, yet when it comes to our beauty products, like the things we use to bathe in or to beautify our appearances, we are much less careful. The age of the beauty blogger has positively thrived on the budget beauty buys, the things we pick up at a fraction of the price of the big brands. But do we really know what these products contain, and if they are harmful to us in any way – are we truly getting a bargain?

CosmEthics aim to bring ethics back to cosmetics by letting us know exactly what we are buying at the time of buying. CosmEthics is based in Finland, and its mission is “to help people find non-toxic products, and help in various situations (allergies, lifestyle or just personal preferences) to find the best products based on their compositions.”

To make this easier for consumers, Cosmethics have produced a free App for Android and Ios that will allow you to find out more about the products you buy. You can use the App to scan barcodes of 1000s of beauty products, with the programme then telling you what the product contains. Three default ingredients would automatically be flagged – Formaldehyde, Parabens and Phthalates.  But you could also add in any ingredients that you would like flagged for personal reasons – maybe linked to allergy or hormones. You may question something based on your diet – is this suitable for use by vegans could be something important to you.

There is a long list of ingredients or triggers that you can chose from, or you can add your own to your alerts.

I think this is such a good idea, especially when you are looking at wash and skin products for young children. Joe has suffered with dry skin and ezcema related problems, and there is no doubt that some products, particularly overly perfumed and cheaper products make this worse. How much easier to scan the bottle with the CosmEthics App than to have to literally stand there and read everyone of those ingredients with extremely long names…..

You can find out more about the App here. You can find the App at the App Store and Google Play

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