7 Easy, Sustainable Skincare Products You Can Buy In Singapore
It's about time you stop buying and using those disposable cotton pads, and exfoliating face scrubs with plastic beads
There's been a lot of talk around sustainability, eco-friendly, eco-certified etc. in the skincare and makeup industry. In fact, terms like "green", "organic", "all-natural" are getting thrown around in marketing campaigns – and some of them are borderline deceptive.
Before you buy into yet another marketing gimmick, here are seven basic rules of a sustainable, environmentally-friendly skincare, makeup, and beauty regimen. In fact, these are all simple steps and changes to your routine that you can make overnight. So, let's get started!
Think we don't have many sustainable, eco-friendly skincare and lifestyle brands around us? Some of these environmentally-friendly giants are literally lurking right under our nose. Take the American brand, Burt's Bees, for instance. The environment is at the heart of the brand's philosophy – the brand started from making handmade candles made with unused beeswax from beehives – and is frequently lauded as one of the personal care brands with the best commitment to sustainability.
Burt's Bees publishes a Sustainability Goal report yearly (last year's linked) and hasn't sent any waste to landfills since 2011 – now, that's an impressive full decade! Most recently, as a testament to Burt's Bees' environment commitment, Clorox acquired Burt's Bees in a bid to gain insight and expertise into the sustainability future which they should be headed towards.
Here's a really bad one – nail polish removers. They are equally harmful for your health and the environment. How so? Many of the common nail polish removers that we use contain multiple chemicals that are known to be toxic to our organs. Like it or not, these chemicals do get readily absorbed by our body through our skin and the nails. And when disposed, they go to the soil beneath our feet or the landfills as contamination.
Do we have options? Yes. There are alternatives to these unhealthy nail polish removers. You'll find a 100 per cent biodegradable nail polish remover from Wilaverde ($11.62 for 118ml) on Amazon Singapore.
If you love snorkelling, surfing, scuba diving, or simply tanning by the beach (club), there's something really nasty that you need to know. Your usual drugstore sunscreen contains ingredients – oxybenzone and octinoxate – that are drastically killing the coral reefs.
But hey, here's a huge way that you can upgrade your skincare routine – swop your current sunscreen for a zinc based, reef (and sea) friendly sunscreen. And in Singapore, the easiest way you can do that is to reach for a Supergoop! sunscreen from Sephora.
One third of all the rubbish and waste that we generate daily is made of packaging. And for higher usage, fast-moving skin, body, and haircare products such as shampoos, body soaps, and face cleansers – are we able to reduce the plastic bottle packaging we're throwing into the landfills?
Yes. And this is one of the easiest and simplest ways you can start if you're embarking on a quest for an eco-friendly skin and haircare routine! Where to buy packaging free beauty products, you ask. It's right under your nose – Lush Singapore.
If you've bought anything from Lush in the recent years, you would have noticed that you get your products in cloths, recyclable paper bags, or plain black tubs. If you're not sure how you can keep your shampoo and body soap bars from melting, get one of the friendly Lush store staff members to teach you. Otherwise, just place the bars on a cheap (and reusable) Daiso body sponge after you shower to allow it to dry.
Are you still using a generic, plastic Darlie or Oral-B toothbrush which you toss out every two to three months? Time to ditch that and permanently upgrade your toothbrush to an electric one or a bamboo toothbrush. Bamboo toothbrushes are aplenty online – you can easily find them for both adults and children on Amazon Singapore and iHerb for $11 (for a box of four).
If you use micellar waters, essence, lotions, and toners with disposable cotton pads, here's a really easy swop which you will never regret – ditching disposable cotton pads for reusable cotton rounds ($10.56 for a box of six) and makeup removers.
The amount of trash that you would have reduced – and money you have saved from buying cotton pads will startle you (at least it did for me since I made this switch two years ago!).
You can get these reusable cotton pads from Amazon or iHerb. But, hey, here's a secret – they go for way cheaper on Carousell or Ezbuy (from Taobao). You'll want to stock up on at least 20 of these reusable cotton pads at once since you'll be using two or three at once, and then conveniently tossing them into the laundry until the next wash and drying cycle.
Oh, and these cotton rounds really give you a nice boost of physical exfoliation from the scrubbing action.
Remember there was a time in the early 2010s when practically every face cleanser came with microbeads that supposedly gave your pores a deep cleanse and scrub those dead skin cells off your face? Then, the face scrub trend just died down and the products just disappeared off the shelves?
Well, it wasn't by coincidence that these face cleansers (and toothpaste!) with "exfoliating micro beads" just vanished. From 2015 to 2018, environmentalists found that these microbeads that humans were flushing down the drains, water pipes, and into the seas and oceans were being eaten by fishes and harming marine life.
In fact, the situation and backlash swelled so serious that the US banned these microbeads, Australia's authority took a stand against it, and personal care conglomerates like the Japanese Kao started issuing statements declaring they would stop producing products with microbeads.
So, when you shop and come across anything that remotely mentions "scrub" or "exfoliating", take an extra minute to read the back of the packaging or whip out your phone to Google the name of the product. Check that those microbeads are not made of plastic – preferably, they should be sugar or salt crystals that will dissolve as you scrub them into your skin. If you're unsure? Just skip those microbeads altogether.