Welcome to eco-beauty week at Green Grechen! All week we’ll be featuring guest posts by beauty bloggers with a special spotlight on greening your beauty routine. Today’s post is a great one to kick-off the week, featuring tips on how to choose & use eco-friendly beauty products and her own personal favorites for Fall, by Spirit Demerson, owner of Spirit Beauty Lounge (one of my favorite places to shop for eco-friendly beauty online – AND where you can save 15% with code “grechen15″)
More about Spirit:
Artist, activist and beauty school dropout, Spirit Demerson has spent many years testing, mixing, analyzing & searching for effective organic beauty products and ingredients. As a child she made her own perfumes using vanilla extract from the pantry and skin toner using fresh watermelon rind (her dads invention.) Cosmetology school was a natural choice but the lure of a modeling career beckoned and she left her native San Francisco Bay Area for NYC at the age of 18. Frustrated by the less-than-luxurious organic beauty selection available at natural foods markets and misleading labels at drugstores, she became an expert, spending hours obsessively researching ingredients, often mixing up batches of lotions and potions in her kitchen.
There are many different reasons why you may want to green your beauty routine – whether it’s out of concern for the environment, trying to avoid carcinogens and toxins for health reasons, or just trying to live a more natural lifestyle in general. One thing you must know is that up to 65% of what we put on our skin is absorbed into the bloodstream and knowing that, it’s definitely worth thinking about what we put on our skin the same way we think about what we eat. In my 10+ years in the beauty biz, I’ve come to realize that by and large, most women do care about the safety and sustainability of their cosmetics and personal care products but don’t want to have to sacrifice efficacy or even perceived luxury, to go green. At the end of the day, a product still has to perform and should still be a pleasure to use. That’s why I feel as an “eco-beauty activist”, the best way I can promote the cause is to provide a source for the best-of-the-best ethical and sustainable products out there and be an example of how the “green & glam” lifestyle has worked for me, without sacrificing a thing!
I’ve spent a lifetime using natural-based beauty products and I can tell you that today, not only are the offerings equal in quality and beauty to any conventional products, but many of them are even better; more effective, more pure, and more beautiful. So many friends, family members and now, customers, have told me that their skin and hair conditions have improved or been cured since switching to natural and organic beauty products. In my own battle with acne, I spent thousands on pharmaceuticals, prescription creams and drugstore treatments that always seemed to make my skin worse until finally starting an all-natural routine that changed my skin for life.
Cosmetic companies like Nvey Eco, RMS Beauty and Priti are proving that the killer chemicals in conventional products aren’t even necessary. You can get long-lasting, flawless results in every shade imaginable without the toxins so why wouldn’t you?! Greening your beauty routine can be fun and easy and I guarantee you’ll make the most of it with these 6 eco-beauty tips: [click to continue…]
As I’ve mentioned before, I love it when my favorite brands incorporate hemp in their designs – it’s the direction that fashion must go if it’s to be TRULY sustainable in my opinion (stay tuned for an article on that later this week). And C&C California does it perfectly. 
