Have you recently decided to switch to non-toxic makeup after reading about all of the toxic chemicals that are in your current cosmetics products but don’t know where to start? The idea of researching and potentially replacing most if not all of the dozens of products you regularly use sounds like a daunting process. After all, you have never looked at any of the ingredients in your products and have never given toxicity a second thought – all you cared about before was whether your mascara could lengthen AND volumize your lashes! It may seem confusing and overwhelming, but this guide will help make the switch to non-toxic makeup easy and painless!

The first thing that you should do when you decide to switch to non-toxic makeup is to do your research on common toxic ingredients that are found in cosmetics. You may think that you don’t have much to worry about, but the FDA has only banned 11 ingredients from being put into cosmetics compared to over 1,000 being banned in the European Union. The ugly truth is that your current products are a lot more toxic than you would like to believe, but you need to know what makes them toxic in order to effectively make a change! A simple, commonly used way to tell if an ingredient is toxic or not is to see if you can easily pronounce it. However, you will likely have to do some research to come up with a list of ingredients that you don’t want in your products. This will include researching what these ingredients are, what they are used for, and their potential health effects. Once you have this list, you can move on to the next step. 

Once you have your “ingredients to avoid” list, you can move on to your makeup bag. This might be a good time to clean out your bag in general, removing old products, dried out or broken products, or products that you don’t use. Once you get down to the products that you actually use on a regular basis, you can start comparing their ingredients with those on your list. If a product has one of the ingredients on your list, mark it down as something you need to switch out to a non-toxic version.

Unfortunately, if you shop for cosmetics like most people at drugstores or department stores, odds are that many of your products will have at least some of the toxic ingredients that you had previously identified. Dealing with replacing all of these different products all at once is overwhelming, so instead of doing that, find the products that you use the most often and the most of and replace those immediately. For the rest of your products, you can simply replace them when they run out – that way it saves stress from you and your wallet. Make sure you replace them with legitimate clean beauty products that have are transparent about their mission and their ingredients.