3 Simple Ways to Make Your Beauty Routine More Sustainable
When we consider how we can make sustainable switches in our routines and lifestyle, things that typically come to mind include: ditching plastic bottled water for a reusable water bottle or carrying our groceries in reusable shopping totes instead of plastic bags. But have you ever considered the environmental footprint of your hygiene and beauty routines? Most of us don’t, but it turns out that a lot of our standard beauty practices can be pretty carbon-intensive.
But fear not — you don’t have to reform to caveman methods to address these issues. And while no one expects you to change into a sustainable beauty poster child overnight, just making a few small, yet mindful, tweaks to your beauty habits can help make a difference in the mark you leave on Mother Earth.
Here are three easy ways that can help you start to clean up your beauty act to be more sustainable!
1. Swap Bottles for Bars
Chances are, most of your shower products, be it body wash or deep conditioner, come packaged in a bottle. And more often than not, those bottles are made of plastic; meaning that once you’ve finished the product inside, that plastic could easily end up in a number of pathways that do harm to the environment.
Wouldn’t it be nice to somehow still get the product inside, without contributing to plastic waste?
Instead: Bars
Bar soaps are coming back into fashion, and for good reason! They are a great alternative to the plastic-encased shower products that so many of us have grown accustomed to. Many bars will come packaged in a cardboard box, which can be recycled. Additionally, you can easily find bars these days that are filled with great ingredients for your hair and skin — sometimes, even better than what you’d encounter in traditional liquid washes.
Truthfully, my favorite part about bars has nothing to do with the shower. Never again will you have to negotiate how to travel by air with your shower products; since they are solids, you won’t have to worry about liquid restrictions!
2. Reach for reusable makeup-removers
While there are various care routines out there to cater to different skin types, at the end of the day, we are all brought together by one sacred commandment: DON’T GO TO SLEEP IN YOUR MAKEUP. Cleansing is an excellent route to go, but I think we can all agree that sometimes, we can be too tired or simply just too lazy to make that extra trip to the sink. So, for perfectly understandable reasons, makeup-removing wipes have become a popular. It’s easy to look past it given their convenience and ubiquitous-ness, but these single-use wipes only end up contributing to more waste on the planet. Ready for an alternative that’s just as easy?
Instead: Reusable Cotton Rounds
It gives you the exact same ease that the traditional single-use wipes come with — just instead of tossing it into a landfill, you just toss it into the laundering bag with the other used ones. Purchase enough to last you a couple of weeks, and come laundry day you can just pop them into the wash with your clothes and have them ready to go for another round of use!
3. Reduce single-use sheet face masks
I know that many of us are smitten by sheetmasks, but hear me out! While sheet masks are fun and convenient, they often don’t have the best rep with the environment. The masks themselves, while often made of natural fibers like cotton and bamboo, are usually soaked in non-biodegradable solutions, rendering their only suitable place post-use: the trash bin. And when you also take into consideration the packaging — which, usually made with a combination of plastic and aluminum, can’t be processed in standard recycling centers, and thus end up in trash — your daily sheet mask habit can end up doing a lot more harm than you thought.
Instead: Non-sheet facial masks
Luckily, there are plenty of popular alternatives to sheetmasks for your facial needs. Cream, clay, mud, gel…the list goes on! As opposed to individually wrapped sheet masks, you can usually get multiple applications out of one container. Most of these masks will require you to either wash or peel them off — leaving behind much less trash than their sheet counterparts.
Just can’t get enough of sheetmasks? Then how about trying a sheetmask that is more sustainable? The Sioris Make It Bright Sheet Mask comes in eco-friendly, recyclable paper packaging and the biodegradable tencel sheetmask is drenched in locally sourced seasonal ingredients!
Do you consider sustainability when buying your beauty/hygiene products? Which ideas from here are you willing to try?
