Beauty Archives - The Clean Living Podcast

SOAP

November 1, 2023

Here’s a picture I never thought I’d paint for you: Imagine you’re in Ancient Rome. You’re a wealthy citizen of the city so you have access to running water and public baths – the first of their kind. You’re bathing – washing your skin and hair – and on the other side of the city someone else, with less wealth and lower on the hierarchy than you, is cleaning dirty wool and newly-picked cotton to weave them into cloth. Which of these people, do you think, is using soap?

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EPISODES MENTIONED

PRODUCT LINKS

Branch Basics Hand Soap

SOURCES

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9407174/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6678709/

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/26/the-human-microbiome-why-our-microbes-could-be-key-to-our-health

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/i-stopped-showering-and-life-continued/486314/

https://www.healthline.com/health/beauty-skin-care/is-soap-bad-for-skin#How-to-ditch-your-soap-for-good

TRANSCRIPT

The Romans and Greeks pioneered running water and public baths. But they wouldn’t have dreamed of using soap to clean their skin. Instead, men and women soaked their entire bodies in water and then smeared themselves with scented olive oils.

While there is evidence of early soap used in ancient times, it was used as a laundry detergent – to clean cotton fibers or sheared wool before weaving them into cloth – rather than for human hygiene.

Despite advances in skin care, soap sold on the market today is essentially the same thing – detergent. We’re actually worse off than Ancient Romans because in our case, it’s synthetic detergent.

Unless it’s artisanally made, small batch or made from natural raw ingredients, a bar of soap you’ll find in the grocery store (let’s say Ivory or Lever) may contain some of the same ingredients as real soap— being animal fats or vegetable fats —but they are not, in the legal-slash-chemical sense, really soap.

Soap is sold to us as a must for cleaning our bodies. We’re told it’s a necessity for removing dirt, oil and dead skin cells – my guess is that most of us wouldn’t feel “clean” if we got out of the shower having just rinsed in water.

But according to scientists and some dermatologists, soap might actually be one of those things that does more harm than good.

According to various studies over the years, that you can find on PubMed and I’ll link to in the show notes, it’s been well documented that conventional soaps can wreak havoc on the skin by changing its pH, destroying healthy bacteria on the skin, and stripping away vital oils. Which could help to explain why conditions such as eczema, psoriasis and acne have been rising steadily over the decades – despite advances in modern medicine.

As I mentioned in the HAND SANITIZER episode from last season, soap is great for stripping away germs. But you can’t strip away the bad stuff without also stripping away the good stuff. The protective oils on our skin are the good stuff – they’re there to maintain a healthy balance in our skin’s barrier function by helping to minimize dryness, fine lines and wrinkles, fight breakouts, level out unbalanced pH levels and protect against environmental damage. So when you strip the skin of those oils with synthetic detergent, what do you think happens?

You get skin that is overly sanitized and lacking the trillions of microbes that colonize our skin and our gut microbiomes that – put simply – allow us to live healthier lives.

It seems like every week, microbiologists are learning more about the incredibly complex systems that make up our microbiome. The relationship we have with our germs and bacteria helps our developing immune systems, protects us from pathogens and reduces our risk of autoimmune conditions. Autoimmune conditions like eczema or psoriasis on our skin, for example.

And as we learn more about the science, there is convincing evidence that scrubbing off our skin microbiome, as well as the natural oils on which these good microbes feed, is not the answer to quote-unquote clean and healthy bodies.

I can hear you through the microphone right now, worrying about your stench. Or maybe worrying about how your husband is going to smell if I tell you it’s time to ditch soap altogether. But don’t worry, we have options – going soapless isn’t going to be an assault on your personal hygiene.

The first thing is to ditch the body wash or conventional soap with any type of synthetic fragrance in it. If you’re a new listener, you can go back to the FRAGRANCE episode to learn more about why it’s problematic… in just about anything.

In researching this episode, I came across Dr. James Hamblin who is the author of the book Clean: The New Science of Skin. In 2016, he wrote an article about his decision to stop showering that went viral – it’s a really compelling read and I’ll link to it in the show notes. One of the things that stood out as interesting to me is that the stigmatism of body odor began as an advertising strategy in the 1920s. And in turn, it helped quadruple the sales of Lifebuoy soap. A hundred years later, we are more perfumed, exfoliated and moisturized than ever.

Am I saying I want to live in a world surrounded by the smell of BO? No. But I do wonder why just the “normal human” smell became such a bad thing – why is it that we have to smell like flowers or pine trees? The only reason we associate those smells with being clean is because of marketing.

And the more I read about the science – and the more I read from doctors and dermatologists commenting on the whole debate – the conclusion was pretty clear to me, all you really need to clean your body is water.

For your armpits or private bits – or when you’re actually covered in dirt, paint or some other hard to wash substance – then yeah, you may need a little something extra. But we have alternative options to soap. The first one is, you guessed it, coconut oil! Yes, coconut oil can be used as a natural cleanser in the shower just as it can be used as a moisturizer after the shower. If you really want to feel like an Ancient Roman, you can gently scrape oil off while in the shower which both cleans off the grime and exfoliates your skin. There’s also dry brushing that essentially brushes off dead skin cells and any dirt. And then there are newer prebiotic body washes that we use in my family that are marketed as microbiome-friendly – my favorite brand is Aleavia and I’ll link to it in the show notes at cleanlivingpodcast.com/soap

Still not convinced? Worried you’re going to be the smelly mom at school pick up? So, here’s what’s going to happen once you start reducing the amount of conventional soap you lather on your body – your skin microbiome is going to get better at self-cleaning. The natural oils in your skin are going to replenish and you’re going to naturally produce less of the smell that we call B.O.

Dr. Hamblin says: “At first, I was an oily, smelly beast. The odor of bodies is the product of bacteria that live on our skin and feed off of the oily secretions from the sweat and sebaceous glands at the base of our hair follicles. Applying detergents (soaps) to our skin and hair every day disrupts a sort of balance between skin oils and the bacteria that live on our skin.”

“But after a while…” he goes on to say… “your ecosystem reaches a steady state, and you stop smelling bad. I mean, you don’t smell like rosewater or Axe Body Spray, but you don’t smell like B.O., either. You just smell like a person.” end-quote

And I believe him – first-hand experience here as I go ahead and throw my husband under the bus here, but one of my husband’s favorite party tricks is to tell people that he doesn’t use shampoo (it isn’t actually a party trick, but it is fun to see people’s reactions when he mentions this). 90 percent of the time they are *appalled,* some of them ask to smell his hair and all of them say “HOW??” But the truth is, his hair isn’t greasy and it doesn’t smell bad – it doesn’t smell like passion fruit – it just smells like hair.

So, what do you say we save the soap for handwashing after the bathroom and before we eat and save our money on the scented body washes? Your microbiome will thank you.

I’ll link to my two favorite hand soap options in the show notes, as well – again that’s at cleanlivingpodcast.com/soap.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast, I’m your host Shannon Lohr. I want to give a quick shout out to L. Cameline for writing the first 5-star review of season two of the podcast. Thank you so much for taking that extra minute to say something nice about the pod – it means more to me than you know. If you listen on Apple Podcasts and haven’t written a review yet, it is a meaningful way to help more people find out about this show and really does mean a lot to me. Thanks for listening and I’ll be back next week.

SUNSCREEN

October 11, 2023

Let me tell you about one of the biggest pain points within my family… it’s the thing that causes the most screaming (by my kids), the most avoiding (by my husband) and the most nagging (by me). It also happens to be an extremely expensive habit (file it under preventative health care, I guess) and is just, well, a general necessary nuisance of my existence. It’s the daily application of sunscreen — and that’s what I’m diving into in this episode.

Listen on iTunes here.
Listen on Spotify here.
Listen on Google Podcasts here.

EPISODES MENTIONED

SKINCARE

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

Your Guide to Sunscreen by the Environmental Working Group

PRODUCT LINKS

SOURCES

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/

https://www.breastcancer.org/risk/risk-factors/exposure-to-chemicals-in-sunscreen

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/does-europe-have-better-sunscreens/

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/the-trouble-with-sunscreen-chemicals/

https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/beware-of-benzene-shining-a-light-on-sunscreen-spray-contamination/

TRANSCRIPT

Living under the Southern California sun, applying sunscreen is just a part of daily life, which was a hard adjustment for both my husband and I, who both grew up in the Northeast when it seemed like, as kids, we only saw a bottle of sunscreen for 2-3 months out of the year when we went to the beach.

Nowadays, doctors and dermatologists recommend the daily application of sunscreen no matter where you live in the world at any time of the year, but it’s still something that many of us avoid or quite simply forget to do. For example, this literally happened in our house yesterday: I put sunscreen on my son in the morning right before he left to go to the pool with my husband. They get back to the house five hours later, and my son’s face is red.

Me to my husband: “Did you reapply sunscreen on his face?”

My husband to me: “I thought you put it on him before we left?”

Me to my husband: “You have to reapply every 90 minutes and more than that if he’s in the water.” And just because, ya know, I can’t help myself – I add: “It says it right on the bottle.”

As if the instructions of using mineral sunscreen have changed over the five years our son has been born, right?

And while it’s easy to place the blame on my dear husband, I do it too. I tell myself that it’s good to get 30 minutes of vitamin D per day when I don’t want to feel greasy for an entire day just from going on a walk.

To complicate matters, there is the expense of using mineral sunscreen – those bottles barely last us a month as a family of four. And then there’s the hesitancy of using chemical sunscreen (that’s cheaper) because of what the research is now telling us.

According to the Environmental Working Group, of more than 1,700 sunscreen products on the market, it found that just one in four met their strict standards for sun protection and didn’t contain harmful ingredients.

“While chemicals can protect us from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays, research strongly suggests that at certain exposure levels, some of the chemicals in some sunscreen products may cause cancer in people,” says BreastCancer.org.

Their statement goes on to say: “Many of these chemicals are considered hormone disruptors. Hormone disruptors can affect how estrogen and other hormones act in the body, by blocking them or mimicking them, which throws off the body’s hormonal balance. Because estrogen can make hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer develop and grow, many women choose to limit their exposure to these chemicals that can act like estrogen.”

And that’s where we get into the difference between mineral sunscreens and chemical sunscreens, knowing that not all are created equal but generally, mineral sunscreens are the safer choice.

The Environmental Working Group released a robust and very comprehensive guide to sunscreen this year, which I’ll link to in the show notes, if you want to read the full report. But I’m going to give you the cliff notes version based on that report, as well as some of their sunscreen recommendations.

By now we all know how I feel about the FDA’s ability to regulate consumer products (go back to the SKINCARE episode if you missed that one – or really, any episode). Despite sunscreens being more heavily regulated by the FDA than other cosmetic products, the safety standards have not been updated since 2011 when the FDA gave all ingredients a passing grade.

The EWG report reveals that no new sunscreen ingredients have been approved for use since the 1990s, and there’s been little change to sunscreen regulation, despite the continued rise of skin cancer rates and the growing importance of strong UVA protection. Just a quick note here: The FDA proposed rule changes in 2019 and 2021 that seem somewhat promising, but they’re still not finalized.

That’s all to say, if you see a sunscreen brand on the shelf at Target or CVS, it doesn’t mean that it’s safe to use. But again, if you’ve been listening to this podcast you know that already.

Here is some good news though: oxybenzone is on the way out. It’s one of the most troublesome sunscreen ingredients and according to the EWG, is now being used much less due to concerns about skin absorption and its potential harm to human health. In 2020, four studies found that oxybenzone can act as a hormone disruptor and increase the risk of breast cancer and endometriosis, and yet it’s still permitted for use in U.S. sunscreens. It’s said to be found in about 13 percent of non-mineral sunscreens.

After pressure from the EWG and other human advocacy groups, in 2019 and again in 2021, the FDA proposed classifying oxybenzone as not generally recognized as safe and effective because of a lack of long-term safety tests. However, again, the FDA has not yet finalized this action.

Chemicals aside, one of the most surprising things (at least for me) from the EWG’s report is that most sunscreens failed to show reliable UVB protection and inadequate UVA protection. The research found that most sunscreens provided just 42 to 59 percent of the UVB protection that was declared on the SPF label, leaving the potential for long-term and unknown UV exposure.

In fact, many of the products that they tested would not meet the UVA standards required in Europe. According to the report, “only about a third of the products tested passed the EU standard, whereas more than nine out of 10 – 94 percent – would get the green light from the Food and Drug Administration.”

And the last thing I’ll say before we talk about how to pick a good sunscreen is that high SPF labels do not necessarily mean they’re better – Banana Boat SPF 100? Don’t do it. In fact, high SPF products may pose greater health risks because they require higher concentrations of sun-filtering chemicals. And as we already know, some of these ingredients may pose health risks when they penetrate the skin.

So, how do you pick a good sunscreen? Well, that’s the first thing: don’t fall for high SPF labels. The EWG recommends picking a sunscreen with an SPF between 15 and 50.

The second thing is to avoid sunscreen with vitamin A. Government data shows that tumors and lesions develop sooner on skin coated with creams containing vitamin A, also called retinyl palmitate or retinol. Avoid any sunscreen whose label includes retinyl palmitate, retinol or vitamin A. This also links back to the SKINCARE episode, when I mentioned my hesitancy about purchasing retinol as an anti-aging serum. If you’re putting retinol on your face, make sure you do it at night before bed, wash your face in the morning, apply sunscreen on your face and wear a hat when you’re outside.

The third thing, as we already know, is to avoid oxybenzone. Instead look for sunscreen lotions with zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, the only two sunscreen ingredients categorized as safe and effective, by the EWG.

The fourth recommendation and this is a huge one for me, from an environmental perspective, can we all please agree to stop using spray sunscreen? No matter what kind of sunscreen it is. Yes, I am the woman at the beach giving the side eye to people spraying that shit everywhere. I get it, I know it’s easier – I don’t like lubing up my sandy, squirming, complaining children with lotion either, but aerosol sunscreens cloud the air with tiny particles that aren’t safe to breathe and most often contain the cancer-causing chemical benzene that is not safe at any level of use. Even some of the chemicals in spray sunscreen that are safe and considered “clean ingredients” when applied to the skin, like titanium dioxide, are toxic when inhaled into the lungs, causing (and I’m not exaggerating here) irreversible damage.

Also – I know, I’m laying this on heavy, now you know what it’s like to be married to me – when the chemicals in spray sunscreen make their way into the environment via airborne aerosol sprays or by washing off our skin and into the water, they’ve been shown to kill coral reefs and disturb ecosystems so dramatically that Hawaii has even passed legislation banning these ingredients.

I know, you’re all mad at me now for calling out the spray sunscreens – but seriously, we can’t justify using them anymore. We can’t even say that they work better than lotion because most of the time it blows away before reaching the skin and is much more likely than lotion to be applied unevenly.

Okay, so what sunscreen should you buy?

As I’ve mentioned, you want to look for products made with mineral-active ingredients, such as zinc oxide and titanium dioxide. They generally score well in EWG’s Guide to Sunscreens because they provide strong sun protection with few health concerns and don’t break down readily in the sun. In fact, zinc oxide and titanium dioxide are the only two sunscreen ingredients categorized as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration in their newly proposed sunscreen regulations.

As a reminder, you can go to the SKINDEEP website or app to browse their list of EWG-verified safe sunscreen recommendations, but I’ll also link our family favorites in the show notes at cleanlivingpodcast.com/sunscreen.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. Before you go, have you gotten a chance to leave a review yet? A five-star review is the very best way to show your support of the podcast and to help other people find out about it. Just tap leave review at the bottom of this episode, tap five stars, and write 1-2 sentences about what you like or what’s helped you. It would mean so much to me – thank you in advance.

BOTOX

September 27, 2023

Let’s face it, we’re all talking about… And if you’re not talking about it, then you’re wondering about it. And if you’re not wondering about it, and you’re over the age of 35, then you’re just a very evolved human. Botox: Who’s getting it? Who’s gotten too much of it? And you, thinking you have crow’s feet and elevens and want to start getting it, let’s discuss…

Listen on iTunes here.
Listen on Spotify here.
Listen on Google Podcasts here.

HAVE AN IDEA FOR A FUTURE EPISODE? Tell me here:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/G9HM7Z3

SOURCES

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872345/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9339823/#:~:text=Abstract,occurring%20substances%20known%20to%20man.

https://www.botoxcosmetic.com/what-is-botox-cosmetic/celebrating-20-years-of-botox-cosmetic#:~:text=On%20April%2015%2C%202002%2C%20the,distinguish%20cosmetic%20from%20therapeutic%20uses.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2011/103000s5232lbl.pdf

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/business/01botox.htmlhttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/can-botox-cause-brain-damage-allergan-fights-3-suits-that-say-so/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-allergan-botox-trial/allergan-wins-new-trial-in-big-botox-damages-case-idUSBRE85019Y20120601

https://www.lawyersandsettlements.com/legal-news/botox-death-paralysis/interview-botox-injections-treatment-14237.html

TRANSCRIPT

Alright, I’m probably not going to make any friends with this episode but let’s face it, we’re all talking about. And if you’re not talking about it, then you’re wondering about it. And if you’re not wondering about it, and you’re over the age of 35, then you’re just a very evolved human. Botox: Who’s getting it? Who’s gotten too much of it? And you, thinking you have crow’s feet and elevens and want to start getting it, let’s discuss…

So I meet with a bunch of women once a month for book club. Yes, the kind of book club where some of us read the book, but all of us show up to drink the wine. We’re all in our mid-to-late-30s and one of the women LOVES her MedSpa. There’s another woman, who goes to the same MedSpa, and so the topic of Botox and fillers comes up, well, not infrequently.

I will say, just as an aside, I do appreciate the transparency of the Millennial generation who are just straight up owning their cosmetic beauty choices. I remember when there was a stigma around Botox and no one would actually admit to getting it. Those days are over – we Millennial women love talking about it, referring our injector, posting before and afters on Instagram and getting. that. referral. discount – amiright?

So, seven of us are sitting there at book club, and naturally, everyone starts going around and saying whether they’ve done botox before. Myself and three other women said they hadn’t, which left three who had. And this was actually shocking to me, because I just assume that I’m the only one still holding out.

I mean, the beauty industry is recommending that 20 year olds start doing botox preventatively – and I’m a lot older than that.

Anyway, that night I get home and I google the name of the MedSpa that was mentioned by these two friends. I knew way less about Botox then than I do now that I’ve researched this episode, and I was curious about the details – beyond just, ya know, a needle goes into your face a few times and then poof, you leave, and your wrinkles are gone.

So, you can imagine my surprise, when I get to the website of this MedSpa in San Diego (that I’ll keep anonymous) and I find their dedicated sales page to Botox and as I read paragraph after paragraph, they continue to refer to it as a neurotoxin. Not by the brand name, not even using the word neuromodulator, they’re using the word neurotoxin.

Now, I did know this much. I knew that Botox is, in fact, a neurotoxin. A neurotoxin is a natural or manmade toxic substance that alters normal activity of the nervous system.

What I didn’t expect is for a MedSpa to outwardly, openly and publicly refer to Botox as a neurotoxin on the sales page of their own website. I was very confused. That’s like, going into a bar, looking at a cocktail menu and seeing a bourbon Old Fashioned described as, “A classic cocktail with simple syrup, bitters and poison – served on the rocks.”

But anyway… I see this on the website, I immediately send the link to my friend who works in the clean beauty industry and I ask her why they would refer to Botox in this way. Surely, they could stick to “neuromodulator,” which would still be accurate but maybe, like, sound a little bit less scary…

She couldn’t come up with an answer either. So, we just concluded that, I don’t know, we didn’t have a conclusion… maybe they pride themselves on their transparency and moral high ground? Orrrr their website must’ve been hacked? I dunno.

This is all just a long winded introduction into telling you that Botox is the trade name (or brand name) for Botulinum (baa·chuh·lai·nuhm) Toxin Type A, a neurotoxin known for causing botulism, an illness that paralyzes muscles and can be fatal. Botulism may sound familiar to anyone who has raised a kid and was terrified of your baby accidentally eating honey for, like, your entire first year of parenthood.

According to the National Institute of Health, Botulinum (baa·chuh·lai·nuhm) toxins are the most toxic naturally-occurring substances known to man.

Yeah. And we’re paying hundreds of dollars to willingly inject it into our faces.

But let’s back up a little bit – in 1989, Botox first got FDA approval to treat medical ailments such as muscle spasms, excessive underarm sweating and eyelid tics. It wasn’t until 2002 that the FDA approved the drug to be used cosmetically to minimize facial wrinkles.

And to be fair to Botox, the Botox brand name is just one brand of the neurotoxin – you may have also heard of Dysport or Juvederm – there are a bunch of others, just like there are different brands of, let’s say, ibuprofen. Botox is the most well known brand so that’s the one I’m going to refer to for the purposes of this episode, but just know that there are others out there.

Just one more quick note here: Botox is also used for medical and therapeutic purposes, specifically for children who have cerebral palsy, and this episode is not a critique on that. Today I’m speaking solely of its cosmetic uses.

So again, as someone who was pretty naive to Botox, and for anyone else who hasn’t gone down this road yet either, the way Botox works is not by eliminating wrinkles. When the Botox wears off, which it does about every 3-4 months, then you’ll start to see your wrinkles again. That’s because Botox is not filling in the wrinkle, or plumping up your skin to minimize wrinkles – no, the neurotoxin is injected into the muscle below your skin and paralyzes it.

Think about it: it’s the muscles under your skin that make your face move and create lines (the ones on the corners of your eyes, around your mouth when you smile, on your forehead when you’re surprised) and when those muscles can’t move they can’t make lines in your skin. When your skin can’t crease, then your skin can’t wrinkle as easily.

And this is the reason that people in their 20s are getting Botox, despite still having natural, smooth and youthful skin. They are preventatively stopping their facial muscles from moving so that they don’t make creases in their skin. They’re counting on less creasing over time to mean less wrinkles when they’re older.

So, the question is: Is there a problem with any of that? Because if you’d ask most dermatologists, they’d say no.

In fact, when I started researching this episode, it was very hard to find anything that spoke negatively about Botox – all of the safety studies focused on how rare side effects or complications are and highlighted the lack of deaths. So much so that I almost abandoned this episode entirely, thinking there wasn’t really anything to sound the alarm on.

But with Botox coming in as the top minimally-invasive cosmetic procedure of the last year, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ 2020 Plastic Surgery Statistics Report, I thought to myself, “If it’s that popular, if it’s that requested by patients (and doctors and scientists are saying it’s safe) then who would speak out against it?”

And then my brain kept circling back to Dopesick, that TV series on Hulu, that my husband and I just finished watching – how many doctors promised their patients that OxyContin was safe? Over and over and over again. To the point that we now have an opioid epidemic in the United States.

Am I comparing Botox’s safety to that of opioids? No, definitely not. It’s just to say, I can think back to a myriad of widely-accepted products on the market that were labeled and recommended as safe and then turned out not to be. Heroin was sold by Bayer as a cough medicine. Smoking cigarettes was prescribed to pregnant women who had anxiety. Sugar was marketed as a health food and Trans fats were once considered healthier than Natural fats – remember margarine and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter?

With this in mind, it prompted me to channel my inner Erin Brockovich and start digging deeper. And what I found out is that the FDA issued a black box label for the cosmetic use of Botox in 2009. According to The New York Times, the requirement was issued just 15 months after the FDA received a petition from a public advocacy group, claiming that the FDA had received reports of 180 serious health problems and 16 deaths connected to Botox injections. The FDA responded to the petition by saying it had identified even more reports of complications, including 225 reports of problems caused by the drug spreading from the injection site to distant parts of the body. In other words, there’s evidence (and even studies that have been conducted since 2009) concluding that Botox doesn’t necessarily stay in the same place it’s injected. So I ask again, can a dermatologist confidently tell you it’s safe if they can’t say that it won’t travel from your forehead to let’s say, your brain? Just spitballing here.

So what did the FDA do? The solution they came up with was to put a black box label on the packaging of Botox – a package with a warning label that a patient will likely never see.

Requiring a drug to be packaged with a black box warning label is one of the strongest safety actions the FDA can take. Black boxes are typically reserved for medications known to have serious or life-threatening risks.

I later found lawsuits and Facebook support groups for people who are still living with debilitating side effects of Botox injections. But it’s suspected that most side effects go largely unreported. So yeah, being wrinkle-free for 3-4 months – or many, many years – does not come without risk.

Despite all of that, though, it’s not actually the black box or the short-term side effects that give me pause. What concerns me, and keeps me from going under the needle myself, is the lack of long-term studies. It’s the lack of long-term studies on a product that essentially requires long-term use.

To keep up with the desired results of starting Botox in the first place, you have to inject it every 3-6 months. And the thing is, we don’t have studies on the effects of injecting a neurotoxin, the most lethal neurotoxin that exists on the planet, 2-4 times per year for the next 25 to 40 years. Because Botox has only been used cosmetically for the last 20 years.

What the safety studies will tell us is that it’s all about the dose – that it’s such a minuscule amount of neurotoxin that’s actually being injected. But if you’ve been a listener for a while, you know that my focus when it comes to chemicals, parabens, phthalates, etc., for me, is the toxic load. It’s about the burden of repeated and lasting exposure. Is doing Botox twice in your 30s going to cause Alzheimer’s in your 80s? Probably not more than anything else. But could the repeated exposure 2-3 times per year for the next 10-30 years be harmful in the long term? Maybe. That’s the uncertain part — we don’t have the long term studies or research. So any dermatologist who tells you “Oh, yeah, Botox is totally safe” is irresponsible and quite frankly, not telling the truth. Because we don’t have the data.

My goal is not to shame anyone or make you feel bad if you love your Botox, I get it. It’s the same reason why so many of us keep drinking alcohol socially even though we know it isn’t good for us either. But if you were kind of teetering on the fence of thinking you should start Botox and you’re starting to worry that you’re going to look 20 years older than everyone else pretty soon, then I want to bring up some other things to consider.

First, back to the black box label – for the several years that Botox was available cosmetically, we were told that the neurotoxin doesn’t leave the injection site. If you put it in your forehead, then it stays in your forehead. We now know, however, that’s not true. Which as I mentioned before, led to Botox getting a black box label by the FDA.

Something else to consider is that when a muscle is kept under constant paralysis, it leads to muscle atrophy. Weakening of the facial muscles & thinning of skin, both caused by long-term Botox use, can – in an ironic plot twist – make you look older. So, if you do too much Botox on your laugh lines for example over many, many years, the muscles will get weaker and flatter and the skin will appear thinner and looser. To top it all off, as your muscles become weaker, they can start to recruit the surrounding muscles in your face when you make facial expressions.

In other words, if you stop using your forehead muscles, you may start squinting using your nose and have wrinkles along the side of their nose. So, then what happens? You need even more Botox for those newly recruited muscles. You can see where a Botox addiction might spiral…

The third thing is something called Botox resistance: After extended use, you can develop antibodies to protect your body against this foreign toxin. So the next time you go to get injected, those neutralizing antibodies recognize the toxin and they try to stop it, which requires more of the toxin being injected to see the same results.

And the fourth thing to consider relates back to what I said a few minutes ago: How long did it take for the medical industry or the FDA to tell us cigarettes were bad? Or opioids? Or baby powder? Or lead paint? Think of all of the FDA-approved products on the market that were widely accepted only for us to be told that after long-term research, they’re actually detrimental to our health, or addictive or cause chronic illness.

Again, there are plenty of things we all do that we know “aren’t good for us” – we write them off as our guilty pleasures or vices or small joys of life. If Botox is that for you, then who am I to stop you? I simply wanted to do this episode to bring the conversation up. Because I think that we’re too often told how safe injectables are when the reality is, we don’t have enough long-term data to know for certain.

But selfishly, I would just love it if we could all collectively agree to save our money, save our time, and be at peace with our naturally aging faces. [candid] I was actually thinking about the teaser episode I did a few weeks ago, talking about the wellness burden and democratizing clean living. I wasn’t thinking of Botox when I recorded that, but it’s relevant. Cosmetic treatments are a privilege, they’re class-related and only financially available for a certain demographic of people. So just by saying no to Botox, it’s one small way to stand up in society, as a citizen, and fight the ever-widening gap between the so-called upper and lower classes. That’s a whole other topic for debate, but something to think about in considering our fellow human beings.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. Did you know that you can suggest topics for future podcast episodes? We have a very quick form that you can fill out on The Clean Living Podcast website – I’ll put the link in the description of this episode (https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/G9HM7Z3). While you’re over there, you can also subscribe to my email list so you don’t miss future episodes or product recs. See you back here next week!

MOISTURIZER

September 20, 2023

This was the most requested topic after last season, so I wanted to get it right. But to be honest, the research left me with more questions than answers (I know, how can something like moisturizer be so puzzling?) Let’s break it down, shall we?

Listen on iTunes here.
Listen on Spotify here.
Listen on Google Podcasts here.

PAST EPISODES MENTIONED

SKINCARE

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

SkinDeep (EWG)

PRODUCT LINKS:

BODY OILS

Coconut Oil

Puur Ingrid Ultra Body Oil

Ingrid + Isabel The Oil

LOTIONS

Everyone Nourishing Lotion

Honest Beauty Everyday Radiance +C Moisturizer

Beautycounter Counterstart Cocoboost Moisturizer

Biossance Squalane + Vitamin C Rose Moisturizer

SOURCES

https://www.katekerrlondon.co.uk/why-i-stopped-using-moisturiser-on-my-face/#:~:text=If%20you%20are%20unsure%20if,stopping%20the%20use%20of%20moisturiser

https://www.byrdie.com/moisturizer-bad-for-skin

https://www.byrdie.com/why-your-moisturizer-isnt-working

https://globalnews.ca/news/4492864/do-you-need-to-use-moisturizer/

TRANSCRIPT

Okay, I went down a research rabbit hole with this one… this was the most requested topic after last season, so I wanted to get it right. But to be honest, the research left me with more questions than answers (I know, how can something like moisturizer be so puzzling?) Let’s break it down, shall we?

In this episode, I’m not going to focus as much on what’s wrong with conventional moisturizers… at least not in the sense of toxins and chemicals. I think you got the picture from the skincare episode last week – yes, phthalates are also an issue with conventional moisturizers… also, sulfates, fragrance, formaldehyde, ethanol, PEG, parabens… you get the picture. These can be found in many brands and products and I’ll go through ways to avoid them and some suggestions for cleaner moisturizers at the end of this episode, but first… I want to tell you about something else I came across in my research.

What I discovered is that there is a camp of doctors, estheticians and dermatologists with a pretty convincing argument that, in general, our skin doesn’t need to be moisturized. At least not with man-made lotions that come out of a bottle.

And I don’t know, maybe this isn’t news to you like it is to me, but the more I thought about it and the more I read about it… it made sense. When I see flakey or dry skin on my face or body, do I think – hm, I should probably drink more water? Or, maybe my shower was too hot… Or, maybe one of the products I’m using is drying out my skin…

No, I automatically assume it’s my skin that’s the problem, so I slather on some lotion and I don’t think twice that maybe it’s the moisturizer I’m using that could actually be doing more harm than good.

Just because I slather on some cream and don’t see that flakiness anymore, doesn’t mean the flakes aren’t still there and that I’ve solved the problem of dry skin. If anything, I’ve just covered it up. Clinical facialist Kate Kerr says, [quote] “In reality, all you’re doing is compressing down that dead skin, stopping it from shedding naturally, and impacting your skin’s barrier function.” [end quote]

Logically, that makes sense right?

And to take it a step further, is my skin actually becoming reliant on this type of “artificial hydration?”

Unless you’re dealing with extreme circumstances – like eczema, dermatitis or psoriasis – there are two things going on here: 1.) Moisturizer or lotion out of a bottle reduces your skin’s natural ability to exfoliate – in other words, the ability to shed dead skin cells and regenerate bright, healthy new skin cells on its own and 2.) Moisturizer inhibits the body’s ability to deliver its natural method of hydration to the skin from within.

It’s kind of like how we don’t actually need soap. That’s right, you don’t need to wash your body with soap. If that comes as a surprise, I’ll do an episode on soap later this season.

From my research, I learned that only ‘true dry skin’ is in need of moisture supplementation. And that ‘true dry skin’ accounts for just 10-15% of the population – these are people who are born with this skin type and are likely to suffer from eczema or dermatitis – or women who are postmenopausal.

But for the rest of us, it’s worth an experiment to see if you actually need the moisturizers you use every day. The estheticians and derms recommend giving your skin a 12 week break to see if you truly have dry skin or if your skin can start to self-hydrate from within.

For your face, you’ll still want to exfoliate and wear SPF but they recommend a serum over a lotion – hyaluronic acid comes in serum form and is a naturally occurring ingredient in the body.

What about your legs, though? And your hands and arms? Expensive serums aren’t going to do the trick for hydrating the entire body, so if you do find that your skin needs a little extra boost then coconut oil is the best option – just make sure to apply to skin when it’s damp to lock in the moisture. This is what I’ve always used on my kids – even my five year old has yet to be exposed to a shampoo or lotion because coconut oil has always done the trick for things like cradle cap or dryness.

Everyone’s skin is different so whether you do a 12 week detox experiment or keep slathering on that lotion, the point (at least for me) is to start to rethink how many products our skin actually needs. The body is really good at regenerating itself so I can’t help but be convinced that the artificial products we’re adding to our skin barrier could be doing more harm than good.

For those of you cringing at the idea of going product-free or tossing your beloved Aveeno from your daily routine, there are better products that we can reach for (even if it’s not coconut oil). I mentioned this in the skincare episode from last week, but I really want to drive the point today. Because again, everyone’s skin is different so what works for me isn’t necessarily the right protocol for you. And that’s where SkinDeep from the Environmental Working Group comes in again.

They are not a sponsor, I don’t even think they know this podcast exists, but I genuinely want us all to get into the habit of running new product purchases through the SkinDeep filter. I’ve gotten into a routine now – whether it’s buying new makeup or a new exfoliating cleanser – to first search for the product name in the SkinDeep database. It’s so easy to use – you can search by brand, product or ingredient – and it gives you peace of mind that you’re either buying something EWG verified (the best option) or something that’s ranked a 1 or 2 in terms of ingredients.

As always, I’ve linked to my sources and product recommendations on The Clean Living Podcast website – for this episode it’s cleanlivingpodcast.com/moisturizer. And while you’re over there, do me a favor and subscribe to my email list. This is an easy way for me to send you more info on new episodes, as well as product recommendations, so you don’t have to go over to the website every time. It will just go straight to your inbox.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. If you learned something from this episode, share it with someone else who might be interested – maybe your sister or a friend who loves her Lubriderm ritual. And keep an eye out for next week’s episode which is a hot topic. Yes, I’m going there… tune in next week for a deep dive on… Botox.

SKINCARE

September 13, 2023

I was recently at my annual dermatology appointment – I come from a long line of skin cancer history, so I get a full body scan once a year to make sure there aren’t any unusual marks – and at the end of the appointment, the doctor asked if I have any questions.

So I asked the thing that’s on every mid-thirties, closer to 40-year-old, woman… In this first episode of Season 2, we’re talking about… skincare.

Listen on iTunes here.
Listen on Spotify here.
Listen on Google Podcasts here.

EPISODES MENTIONED

FRAGRANCE

RECOMMENDED RESOURCES

SkinDeep (EWG)

PRODUCT LINKS:

Kleem Organics Hyaluronic Acid Serum

Moon Juice Plump Jelly Hyaluronic Acid Serum

Biossance Squalane + Phyto-Retional Serum (plant-based)

MyChelle Dermaceuticals Perfect C Serum

Honest Beauty Calm + Porefect Serum

SOURCES

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30092451/

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/hormones

https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/pdf/10.1289/ehp.6723https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0890623820300253

https://www.fertstert.org/article/S0015-0282(16)62728-0/pdfhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0161813X10002354

https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/cosmetic-ingredients/phthalates-cosmetics

Transcript

So I asked the thing that’s on most mid-thirties, closer to 40-year-old, woman’s mind… “If there’s one thing you’d recommend (besides sunscreen) to slow down the natural aging process, what would it be…?”

In this first episode of Season 2, we’re talking about… skincare.

So what was my dermatologist’s answer? In a surprise twist, she actually didn’t try to sell me on Botox… and her answer was the exact same as an esthetician I talked to a few weeks earlier. They both said: Alternate using a retinol and Vitamin C serum at night, and use hyaluronic acid and SPF 30 during the day.

Yeah, so I asked for one recommendation and got four recommendations but I guess, doctors do tend to be overachievers.

Being based in Southern California, I was already using a daily SPF on my face, but that left me in research mode for the other three products I needed to be applying to my face at least once per day – presumably for the next I don’t know 50 years? Will I still be trying to slow aging when I’m 88, probably not…

Fast forward to me scouring the internet for a retinol, vitamin C serum and hyaluronic acid – and sifting through the hundreds of products on the market, ranging from $6.00 to $320 per bottle.

But then of course, being me, there’s a whole other level of complication that comes with this research, because I don’t want to start putting any questionable ingredients on my face – every single day. The thing about the skin care industry, whether it’s makeup, sunscreen or yes, anti-aging serums… is that conventional skin care products can contribute to hormone imbalance, infertility, as well as breast, ovarian and uterine cancer in women.

And that’s because of three main ingredients – can you call them ingredients? – three main components: BPA, parabens and phthalates. If you Google it, you’ll find dozens of studies drawing a similar conclusion about these toxins but the one I’m going to highlight is from 2018 when researchers at George Mason University discovered links between the chemicals widely used in cosmetic products and changes in reproductive hormones.

The researchers analyzed the urine samples of 143 women aged 18 to 44 who had no known chronic health conditions and did not use birth control.

Those with chemicals such as parabens (which is a preservative widely used in makeup and skincare), and bisphenol A (BPA) in their urine were found to have abnormal amounts of the reproductive hormones estrogen and progesterone.

So, there was the presence of parabens and BPA in their urine. As well as “abnormal” levels of estrogen and progesterone.

And granted, 143 women is admittedly a small sample size for a research study, but this is only one study.

Additional studies indicate that too much estrogen has been linked to fibroids, irregular menstrual periods and breast cancer. Too much progesterone is associated with breast cancer, while it is thought BPA, known as the ‘gender-bending’ chemical for its effects on male breast growth, could cause infertility.

For the purposes of this episode, it’s not parabens or BPA that I want to focus on – I talked quite a bit about both in Season One. It’s the third component, phthalates, that I want to zoom in on here.

I have talked about phthalates before in the Fragrance episode that I’ll link to in the show notes below, but believe me when I say, they’re worth bringing up again.

Phthalates describe a group of chemicals used to make plastics more durable. They are often called plasticizers and they’re added to everything from cleansers to household goods to vinyl flooring to personal care products to water bottles and takeout containers to make them durable, flexible and/or fragrant. The reason that phthalates, in particular, are such a threat to our health is because, even if you aren’t putting them on your skin, they easily escape from these products as vapors or particles in the air that we inhale.

In fact, phthalates can be found in the urine of nearly every American, as well as in blood, sweat, breast milk and semen.

They’re also found in makeup, hair spray, deodorant, and perfumes from brands you may have in your medicine cabinet and makeup bag right now: Revlon, Procter & Gamble, Calvin Klein, Johnson & Johnson, the list goes on.

As I learned in reading both animal studies and human studies, hormone-disrupting chemicals like phthalates change how reproductive organs develop in the womb. So, it’s not just your own fertility that’s being affected – the harmful effects of these toxins end up playing out over a lifetime and even across generations. In fact, scientists think prenatal exposures to phthalates may set the stage for gynecological disorders like PCOS and may make women more sensitive to other chemicals that impair fertility. So basically, exposure to phthalates can cause a pregnant woman to pass on fertility problems to her female baby.

According to a separate study, children and babies were shown to have higher exposure to most phthalates than adults do. Prenatal exposure to phthalates is correlated with greater social deficits, as well as impaired social communication, social awareness and social cognition in children – this particular study specified children 7 to 9 years old.

I’m just going to pause here with a quick thought: The hardest part about doing this podcast is sharing the type of info I’ve just spent the last five minutes talking about. I hate the idea that you’re on your daily walk, pushing your sweet baby in a stroller, and I’ve just completely freaked you out. I can completely empathize with a racing heart and sweating palms as you mentally survey all of the products you used while you were pregnant. I’ve been there and I don’t want anyone to go into panic mode. The format of this podcast is based on the idea that knowledge is power – it’s about progress over perfection, knowing that if you breathe air, drink water and eat food, then there’s no way to completely avoid the things I’m talking about.

So, that’s all to say – don’t panic. I will never end an episode without showing you a better way and empowering you to make small changes that will benefit you and your family in the long run. The amazing thing about the human body is that it’s regenerative and restorative – we can heal it from the inside out just by slowly reducing exposure and slowly introducing better options. Okay? So stick with me here.

Alright, so now we know, phthalates: not good for you, found in a lot of things, impossible to avoid but one area where we can avoid them is in our skincare.

So, how do you know if there are phthalates in the current skincare you use? Maybe you’re thinking, “Shannon, I just checked the label on my face wash and it doesn’t say phthalates as one of the ingredients. Does that mean I’m in the clear?”

Well, if you were freaked out before – now is the part where you have every right to become enraged.

In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (or FDA) does not require the labeling of specific ingredients, including phthalates, in the packaging of cosmetic products.

This is a direct quote from the FDA’s website: “…the regulations do not require the listing of the individual fragrance or flavor, or their specific ingredients … As a result, a consumer may not be able to determine from the ingredient declaration on the label if phthalates are present in a fragrance or a flavor used in the product.”

The statement on the FDA’s website goes on to say: “Under the law, cosmetic products and ingredients, with the exception of color additives, are not subject to FDA approval before they go on the market.”

And then, despite all of the studies indicating otherwise, the statement says: “At the present time, the FDA does not have evidence that phthalates as used in cosmetics pose a safety risk.”

It’s also worth noting that the FDA hasn’t updated its “Survey of Cosmetics for Phthalate Content” since 2010. Think about how many new products have come to market in the past 13 years…

But I digress, let’s focus on what we can do as consumers to fix this for ourselves and for our families if our leadership won’t take responsibility.

The first place to start is with the skincare products in your own home. If we can’t remove all of the phthalates from our lives, then let’s at least try to remove the ones we put directly on our bodies.

The most simplified way I can boil it down is to eliminate products that have fragrance, flavor or a big name cosmetic label. At the risk of demonizing every cosmetic conglomerate, if the product comes from a big brand, has a smell or flavor and doesn’t say “fragrance free” or “phthalate-free,” then it’s probably not something you want to use. Again, this is a generalization but an easy rule of thumb to remember when you go to buy new products.

Where things get trickier is with the brands you use that may not be as well known, or they have fragrance but it says it’s an essential oil or it’s labeled as a “natural” flavor. This is when we can get confused by greenwashing and need an outside vetting source, which is why I recommend the SkinDeep website any time you buy a new personal care product.

SkinDeep was started by the Environmental Working Group and I’ll link to the website below – it’s a free resource where you can search their database of virtually any cosmetic or personal care product, brand or ingredient.

So what I would recommend right now is to whip open your medicine cabinet or makeup bag and search some of the products you use the most using SkinDeep. You’ll get a detailed report about the product, including the problematic ingredients and a ranking from 1-10 of where it falls from Best to Worst. If you find out the beloved Covergirl foundation you’ve been using for 15 years is ranked as a 5, don’t panic. You can then search their database of EWG verified foundations for an alternative.

For some quick recs, a few of my favorite skincare and makeup brands are W3LL PEOPLE (which you can actually find in Target) and Biossance – I’ll link those in the show notes at cleanlivingpodcast.com/skincare. As a friendly reminder to any new listeners, links to all of my research sources and the studies I mention in every episode can also be found in the show notes, as well.

What I want to leave you with for today, though, is the SkinDeep website and a five minute homework assignment to search some of the skin care products that you use the most, using their search tool. It’s cliche to say, but knowledge is power and this is one way to start claiming your own power every single night when you go to wash your face or every morning when you get ready for the day.

Oh, and for those of you wondering about my dermatologist’s recommendations at the top of the episode, I didn’t end up buying Retinol. Retinol is a potent form of Vitamin A and is ranked a 9 by the EWG, because of the mix of retinol and sun exposure. I’m also still breastfeeding so until I can do more research, it felt like a safe pass. I ended up buying a plant-based retinol serum instead called Bakuchiol that is ranked a 1 by the EWG and although I’m sure it doesn’t work as well to reduce wrinkles, it feels like a better option right now. I’ll link to the hyaluronic acid and vitamin C serum I bought in the show notes. Again, that’s at cleanlivingpodcast.com/skincare

Side note: I’m looking at the recording time right now and I definitely did not stick to the 10 minute episode I promised you… Someone got a little too excited – I’ll try to reel it in for future episodes.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. If you learned something today please share this episode with a friend — maybe the person who you know is still using that Clean & Clear facial burst cleanser, remember that? (16 year old Shannon loved her morning burst of microbeads… oh, to be a teenager in 2002…) See you next week.

ENCORE: Sustainable Fashion

April 26, 2021

Hello, hello! I’m back with a bonus episode for season one while you wait for season two to release this summer!

How often do you think about the clothing you buy? Where it comes from, where it was made, what it’s made from? When you think about all of the other things in the world to care about, why should fashion be one of them? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode…

Listen to the episode here

Product Recommendations

Market45 – ethical fashion marketplace

Factory45 – sustainable fashion brands to support

Episodes Mentioned

Listen to the CLOTHING episode here.

Source List:

Factory45

Subscribe on iTunes here.
Subscribe on Spotify here.
Subscribe on Google Podcasts here.

Transcript

Hello, hello! I’m back with a bonus episode for season one while you wait for season two to release this summer!

One of the first episodes of season one was about CLOTHING. I specifically talked about shopping second-hand and suggested thrift stores both online and brick and mortar. If you missed that episode on used clothing, make sure to check it out.

But there’s another side of the coin when it comes to clothing and it’s sustainable and ethical fashion — in other words, clothing that is made from environmentally-friendly materials and ethically manufactured in factories that pay their workers a fair and living wage.

Because, unfortunately, when it comes to the fashion industry — neither of those things are a guarantee. In fact, it’s more likely than not that the clothing is made petroleum-derived polyester and was sewn in factories in the developing world where safety standards and fair wages are not top of mind, to say the least.

If quote unquote “clean clothing” isn’t something you’ve thought much about, then you’re not alone. I understand why it’s so much easier to grab another black t-shirt at Target than it is to seek out the sustainable fashion brand selling a black t-shirt at 3x the price because it’s made from organic cotton by people who are paid fairly to sew it.

In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that I was a bargain-bin, fast fashion junkie myself. In college, I was notorious among my friends for going to Forever21 or H&M on a Friday afternoon after classes, buying a dress or shirt for less than 10 dollars, wearing it that night and then never wearing it again.

When fast fashion is that cheap, it becomes as disposable as a cup of coffee.

So what was my catalyst for change?

In 2011, I set out to start a fashion brand. The idea was to create a versatile travel garment that could be worn a bunch of different ways and be easily thrown in a backpack to take on adventures around the world.

Seemed straightforward enough — sketch out the idea, take it to a manufacturer and they’ll just make it for us, right?

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

In the year and a half my then-cofounder and I spent looking for a factory to create our idea, we also started researching the fashion industry.

And we learned that it’s riddled with issues. From dye runoff going into public drinking systems, to modern day slavery, to fatal factory collapses, to massive amounts of waste, to microplastics in the ocean, the traditional fashion industry is one of the major polluters of the planet and one of the main contributors to climate change.

So, we decided: if we were going to start a fashion brand then we were going to do it the right way from the start — putting planet + people first.

After months and months of dead-ends and feeling like we’d never be able to start our brand the way we wanted to, we finally got a break. We ended up sourcing 100% recycled fabric that didn’t need to be dyed, organic cotton notions and trims, real renewable wooden buttons, 100% recycled packaging and we found a factory in North Carolina that paid its workers above minimum wage. Our entire supply chain was set up within a 50 mile radius, which is basically unheard of in a fashion industry that is known for shipping thousands of miles overseas.

We went on to raise over $60,000 in pre-orders of our signature piece, we went on a sustainable fashion tour or the Pacific Northwest to talk to people about the detrimental effects of fast fashion, we were featured in the New York Times, tweeted by the Wall Street Journal — it was this huge whirlwind of success in early entrepreneurship.

But what I realized through that experience is that it should be easier to start fashion brands that are sustainably and ethically made from the beginning. Not as a way to backpedal because slave labor has been found in your supply chain or because your fabrics are damaging local water systems.

There was a greater conversation that needed to happen to shift the fashion industry and it was my belief that by helping to launch new sustainable fashion brands, they would help to pave the way in creating that dialogue for consumers — while at the same time, putting pressure on the bigger brands to clean up their acts.

Since 2014, I’ve helped entrepreneurs all over the globe, from Sweden to New York to Dubai to Australia, launch independent fashion and accessories brands that are made from sustainable materials in ethical factories.

These entrepreneurs are the ones spreading the word about why you should care about the clothes you buy. They’re collectively shaping a new future for the fashion industry and helping consumers understand the difference in fabrics, craftsmanship, product end-life, inclusivity and more. I’ll share links to check out some of these brands in the show notes at cleanlivingpodcast.com/sustainablefashion

And while yes, the price of a sustainably-made black t-shirt is more expensive than a black t-shirt from Target, the sustainably-made black tee is likely going to be more durable, timeless and longer lasting which ultimately means the cost per wear is actually lower than the Target tee.

We simply can’t care about creating a more sustainable world without caring about the impact of our own wardrobes. It’s one of the most impactful purchasing decisions you can make.

If you’d like to get involved in being part of the sustainable fashion solution, beyond your impact as a shopper, applications to Factory45 are opening on May 6th. Factory45 is the online business school for fashion entrepreneurs and I work with people, just like you, to launch their own brands in a way that’s sustainably and ethically made. You can learn more about Factory45 at factory45.co

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. If you know someone who has an idea for a fashion brand but has been stuck at a dead-end or isn’t exactly sure where to get started, please send them this episode or a link to Factory45. I’d love to help them. Here’s to creating a cleaner, more sustainable world for all of us.

Season One Finale

February 1, 2021

Yes, you read that right — this is the final episode of season one of The Clean Living Podcast! In three and a half months, I’ve released 35 episodes and it has been a whirlwind. To close out the first season, I’m sharing some general musings and what to expect from the podcast moving forward.

Listen to the episode here

Subscribe on iTunes here.
Subscribe on Spotify here.
Subscribe on Google Podcasts here.

Transcript

To be completely honest, I had very low expectations when starting this podcast back in October. Unlike most of the other ventures I usually pursue, I didn’t set out to start this show with any clear goals. I figured it would be a straightforward way to share what I’ve learned about clean living with my family, friends and community — during a pandemic — when we all needed to be extra mindful of boosting our immune systems and decreasing our toxic load.

It was about a month and a half from the inception of the idea to start a podcast and the release of the first episode — and in the business world, that’s a short runway. I also set the lofty timeline of releasing three episodes per week in the first month and half, which looking back, was insane. (A big thanks to my podcast manager, Myesha, for keeping up with the crazy deadlines I set.)

So yes, a whirlwind, but there was also such a motivation to keep it going every week. I’ve heard from friends who immediately changed their deodorant or ditched their Yankee candles, other friends who listened to my grocery list episode while doing their own grocery shopping, and the podcast was even a topic of a lot of conversation during a Christmas Zoom call with my extended family. My mom actually got my dad to finally buy mostly organic food. That’s a big personal win — as my mom and sister can attest. Love you, dad.

It has been really fun and inspiring to hear the changes that people are making in the name of wellness — so keep the stories coming.

With that said, there is also so much work that goes into every single episode — from the research of every topic to the vetting of sources to writing the script to recording to editing to creating a recommendations list to publishing the show notes page and creating the graphic for Instagram. I spend about 4-5 hours a week on a project that does not generate any revenue for my business.

Which leads me to today’s episode on the first day of February. With the end of season one, I’m taking a pause on the podcast to focus on my real business, Factory45, which launches every year in May.

My team and I start prepping for the start of the program now and there is a ton of work that goes into it. Which doesn’t leave as much time to focus on creating content for a free podcast. The good news is, the successful launch of my sustainable fashion program every year allows me to keep doing free projects like this one. So, I’ll just ask that you bear with me for a couple of months, while I hunker down on Factory45. It also gives you plenty of time to catch up on any episodes you missed in season one and to continue sharing with your own friends and family.

One other thing we’re going to be working on over the next few months is a Product Recommendations page on The Clean Living Podcast website where you’ll be able to find all of my product recommendations in one place without having to navigate to individual episodes. We’re hoping to set up some affiliate links and referral codes so that by purchasing through my links you’re helping to fund the podcast without having to pay anything extra. I’m hoping to do this without sending people to Amazon so TBD on how that goes.

In season two, I’m looking forward to bringing you episodes on sunscreen, nail polish, dish soap, coffee & tea and a whole lot more. If there is a specific topic you’d like me to cover make sure you submit your suggestion using the survey link on cleanlivingpodcast.com/hello.

Until then, please help me spread the word about The Clean Living Podcast. More listeners means more incentive to keep the show going and is an additional way to monetize the show for the long term. Thank you so much for tuning into season one and for coming back again and again to each new episode — the retention rate has been pretty incredible and for that, I am so thankful.

And finally, if you’d like to be notified when Season Two releases in the Spring / Summer make sure you’re subscribed on the podcast platform of your choice or on The Clean Living Podcast email list. Just go to cleanlivingpodcast.com to sign up with your email.

Until season two, I’m wishing you all a cleaner, more sustainable world for all of us.

Mascara

January 14, 2021

Mascara is the second most used cosmetic in the United States. But what are the ingredients actually used in our favorite mascara brands? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode.

Listen to the episode here

Product Recommendations

Beautycounter

ILIA

LUV + CO.

100% PURE

Episodes Mentioned

Listen to the PSA episode here.

Listen to the FOOD DYES episode here.

Listen to the DEODORANT episode here.

Listen to the COOKWARE episode here.

Sources

https://blog.cleanbeautybox.com

https://www.ewg.org

Subscribe on iTunes here.
Subscribe on Spotify here.
Subscribe on Google Podcasts here.

Transcript

My favorite (okay, lamest) mask joke is that the mascara industry must be booming from the pandemic. The point being that our eyes are literally the only part of our faces that get any attention anymore. I rarely put any makeup on, forget lipstick, but I’ll swipe a little mascara on my eyelashes when I want to feel fancy. But what are the ingredients actually used in our favorite mascara brands? That’s what we’re exploring in this episode.

Pre-pandemic, mascara was the second most used cosmetic in the United States — lipstick was number one. I imagine the popularity contest has changed due to “mask life” which is even more problematic given the common ingredients in conventional mascara.

I tapped into the research done by my friend and clean beauty advocate, Claire Molyneaux, founder of The Clean Beauty Box. Since the cosmetic market is largely unregulated, more on that in the PSA episode, Claire says most mascara brands on the market contain coal tar and other toxic chemicals to keep your lashes thick, long and smudge free.

I’m going to link to the list of 8 chemicals used in mascara that are harmful to your health, but I want to highlight five of them in this episode. Just to get my point across ; )

The first one is Parabens, which is a fancy word for preservatives. There are several different types of parabens but they all are used to extend the shelf-life of your mascara. Unfortunately, these chemicals are absorbed through the tiny pores around your eyes, thus entering your bloodstream. If you’ve listened to this podcast before then you know that parabens are in virtually every conventional beauty and cosmetic product and yet they have been linked to increases in breast cancer by mimicking estrogen and causing endocrine disruption. They have also been linked to reproductive toxicity, neurotoxicity, immunotoxicity, and skin irritation.
Synthetic dyes — if you’ve listened to the episode on Food Dyes you already know that any synthetic dye is problematic. Even if it’s absorbed through skin pores, instead of ingested, it still enters your bloodstream. In mascara, the dyes are labeled as FD&C or D&C, followed by a color and a number (e.g. FD&C Red No. 6, D&C Green No. 6). They’re believed to be toxic and carcinogenic.
Aluminum Powder — we’ve talked about the effects of aluminum in the episodes on deodorant and cookware, and this known neurotoxin is also found in most mascaras. Long term exposure of aluminum powder can impair the body’s ability to detox mercury. This can result in making any amount of mercury that is in the body even more toxic.
Retinyl Acetate or Vitamin A Acetate is found in many brands of mascara, and has been targeted by the EWG as an ingredient of high concern because it can cause biochemical or cellular level changes. Other health effects include developmental and reproductive toxicity, and organ system toxicity. Acetate has been prohibited and restricted in Canadian cosmetics and yet it’s still used in the United States.
Formaldehyde is used as another preservative in mascara and is a known carcinogen.

So yeah, that’s a starting list of harmful ingredients in most mascaras. And just to reiterate my message from past episodes, this isn’t about single exposure. Most of us use mascara at least a few times a week, if not every day, so it’s the repeated, long term exposure to these toxins and chemicals that is particularly concerning.

So, if mascara is a part of your beauty routine, then I first recommend searching for your particular brand on the EWG’s SkinDeep app or on the Think Dirty app.

If you find that the mascara you’re using has a moderate to high level of concern then this episode’s “This for That” segment is a suggestion to switch your mascara to a clean beauty brand. I’ve used both Beautycounter and Ilia mascara and have loved both — no smudging issues and I get the same amount of lash extension as I did when I used Maybelline or Covergirl back in the day. I’m going to link to some of my other favorite clean mascaras, including a Black woman-owned beauty brand, in the show notes at cleanlivingpodcast.com/mascara

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. Did you know that there’s a clean living quiz on the podcast website where you can find out your own clean living score? Just go to cleanlivingpodcast.com and scroll down to the quiz. Here’s to creating a cleaner, more sustainable world for all of us.

Tampons

January 7, 2021

Ladies, we have got to stop putting bleach up our hoo-hahs. “Bleach? I don’t put bleach up there…” you may be thinking. But if you use conventional tampons, you are absolutely putting bleach (among other things) into your vagina 4-7 days per month…

Listen to the episode here

Product Recommendations

Organic Cotton Tampons:

Menstrual Cups:

Sources

https://www.womensvoices.org

https://www.alive.com

https://slate.com

https://www.bustle.com

http://www.womensvoices.org

Subscribe on iTunes here.
Subscribe on Spotify here.
Subscribe on Google Podcasts here.

Transcript

My husband told me yesterday that he got a text from one of his guy friends from high school saying, “I’ve listened to every single episode of Shannon’s podcast. A+.” While I was very flattered, it was not great timing to write the tampon episode the next day. So, to my husband’s friend Joe, this episode is not for you but feel free to keep listening and pass the info along to all of the women in your life : ) Alright, let’s talk periods.

Ladies, we have got to stop putting bleach up our hoo-hahs. Bleach? I don’t put bleach up there… you may be thinking. But if you use conventional tampons, you are absolutely putting bleach (among other things) into your vagina 4-7 days per month.

I don’t remember them teaching us this is the limited sex education we got in middle school, but the vagina is a highly permeable place. Anything we put inside is very easily absorbed through the mucus membrane and then into our bloodstream. So, if you’re putting anything that is remotely unnatural or dare I say “toxic” into this highly permeable space, then it can present a toxic burden to your body.

Because tampons are considered a “medical device” by the Food and Drug Administration, manufacturers are not required to provide a full disclosure of what is in their tampons. So, tampons (as well as pads) may contain odor neutralizers, dyes, pesticides, and fragrances.

Tampon manufacturers and the FDA say that tampons are safe, and that the level of dioxin is so low that they pose no real health risk. A dioxin is a very dangerous chemical and a by-product of bleaching. Tampons are made of rayon, in addition to cotton, and if the ones you’re using are white then something was used to get that color. It used to be that tampon manufacturers used chlorine gas to purify the wood pulp which is used to make rayon. And this process did contribute to dioxins in tampons.

So, now manufacturers purify the wood pulp with a chlorine-free bleaching process that uses chlorine dioxide as the bleaching agent. This process can cause dioxins to be detected in trace amounts in tampons but the level is so low that it’s sometimes not even detectable. So it is considered safe by FDA standards.

But as I’ve talked about before in the deodorant episode, this would be less of a concern if we were talking about single tampon exposure. And that’s how the safety of products is measured — it doesn’t consider the lifetime exposure. Because here’s the thing: We are talking about thousands of tampons. It’s said the average woman uses 11,000 tampons in her lifetime.

Dioxin is one of the most potent and dangerous chemicals on the planet. Even just a minimal amount can cause damage. So while the new bleach being used by manufacturers is safer than other bleaches, we can’t assume that it is safe to women’s bodies given the large amount of tampons used over our lifetime.

So again, while it wouldn’t be as much of a concern if we were talking about single exposure or even a handful of exposures, it’s the repeated exposure that’s problematic. What’s even worse is that dioxin can accumulate over time in our systems.

This chronic exposure disrupts our hormones and endocrine system, causes metabolic changes and increases our risk of cancer. Continual exposure to chemicals and toxins in our environment can also contribute to infertility, endometriosis and thyroid disorders — all of which are on the rise among women.

And unfortunately, this isn’t just about bleach and dioxin, a study completed by Women’s Voices have found over 20 other questionable ingredients in various feminine products — from preservatives to dyes and colorants to fragrances and pesticides.

If we are concerned about chemicals and toxins in our beauty products and food, then it makes sense to be equally concerned about something that is being directly inserted into the most sensitive area of our bodies.

So, in this episode’s segment of “This for That” I’m going to suggest two options. The most obvious one is to start buying organic tampons and pads. You’ll want to look for chlorine-free with no plastic applicator. The Honest Company makes them at an affordable price and there are a few other smaller subscription brands that I’ll link to in the show notes at cleanlivingpodcast.com/tampons.

Of course, this option doesn’t account for the massive amount of waste that feminine products amount to (I know, it’s hard being a woman). All of those tampons and pads have to end up somewhere and it’s either in our oceans or our landfills. So the option I would encourage and highly recommend is a menstrual cup.

And I’ll be the first to say, just like I said I would never be a vegetarian when I was in college and am now going on my 10th year of vegetarianism, I also said I could never use a menstrual cup. But after using one for the past six years, I will never go back. There is definitely a learning curve but once you find the right fit, you’ll get the hang of it after 2-4 months of use and you’ll be a full-on convert, too.

There are so many benefits to using a menstrual cup over tampons and pads — they’re made out of high quality silicone so there’s no risk of endocrine disruption, they hold more so you need to change it less times than a tampon, there’s no risk of toxic shock syndrome and you can actually use it in anticipation of your period — best of all, they’re reusable. I’ll link to a variety of menstrual cup options on the show notes page at cleanlivingpodcast.com/tampons.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. If this episode was helpful, please share it with your best girlfriend — she’ll be happy you did. Here’s to creating a cleaner, more sustainable world for all of us.

PSA

November 18, 2020

Back in September, I attended CleanCon — a virtual conference hosted by the Environmental Working Group — that was focused on clean beauty and personal care products. Throughout the five hour event, there was one overarching message that I kept hearing over and over from clean beauty advocates, scientists, CEOs and small business owners…

Listen to the episode here

Product List

Health Living app from Skin Deep and EWG (FOOD, HOME & BEAUTY)

Think Dirty app (BEAUTY)

GreenChoice app (FOOD)

Sources

https://www.ewg.org

Subscribe on iTunes here.
Subscribe on Spotify here.
Subscribe on Google Podcasts here.

Transcript

Back in September, I attended CleanCon — a virtual conference hosted by the Environmental Working Group that was focused on clean beauty and personal care products. Throughout the five hour event, there was one overarching message that I kept hearing over and over from clean beauty advocates, scientists, CEOs and small business owners. In this episode, I’m going to echo that public service announcement because it’s so important for us to be aware of.

I’m going to start off this episode by sharing a little personal history for reference — I am an Enneagram 8. If you’re not familiar with the Enneagram, it’s a personality test that focuses on 9 archetypes and how those personalities interact. An Enneagram Type 8 is “The Challenger” — we are assertive, self-confident, often too direct and the running joke is that we worry we’re the worst type.

And while yes, 8’s can be too blunt, hot-headed, and get a bad rep, we are also the archetype that seeks truth and justice and is very protective of others.

As a kid I had a tendency to challenge my teachers in class, while also having the tendency to befriend the underdog or new kid. As an adult, this has manifested into questioning the narrative and never taking anything at face value.

So, where am I going with this?

For most people, if you see a product on a shelf or available to purchase online, you assume that it is safe. Why wouldn’t it be, right?

Why, in the world, would anything be available for sale — for us to exchange our hard earned dollars — and for that product, in turn, to cause us harm.

Fundamentally, that just doesn’t make sense, right?

But here’s the thing — and it’s the thing that has been echoed over and over by clean living advocates:

There is no regulation, no legislature, no standard when it comes to personal care and beauty products. So that means that any company can claim to be “natural,” “non toxic,” or any of the other buzzwords without anything to back it up.

So you have two sides of the coin: You have companies claiming to be safe and non-toxic or “natural” and it not being true. Or you have companies that don’t even try to claim those things because it would be so far-fetched but they know it doesn’t matter because they’re household brand names and they know people won’t ask questions or necessarily care.

The truth is, it’s very hard to know which brands to trust because corporations don’t necessarily have your best interest at heart.

You may be thinking, what about the FDA? They have safety standards in place to protect us. But the sad fact of the matter is, FDA-approved doesn’t mean a whole lot. Their standards are so laughingly low when it comes to beauty and personal care products that a product could contain several ingredients that are currently banned in Europe, but still get FDA approval.

The other argument from the FDA and big corporations is that some products may contain questionable ingredients, but they’re such trace amounts that it’s virtually nothing.

The problem with that is most of us use these products, like body lotion or shampoo or makeup or deodorant, every day.

So, let’s say your stick of deodorant has five questionable ingredients, but they all have trace amounts, combining those five ingredients together is no longer a trace amount. To top it off, this is a product that you probably swipe under each arm every day.

I know, I’ve gotten all doomsday on you — again. But that’s why this education is so important. The only way to truly know which products are safe for you and your family is read the labels, learn the ingredients or find someone you trust who can recommend products to you.

Because the real truth is, as cliche as it has become, is that the most impactful way to make change is by voting with your dollars. We’ve already seen just from the early movement of people in the clean beauty space that the market can and will shift. And when the market shifts that’s when clean products will become more affordable and accessible to everyone.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Clean Living Podcast — I’m your host Shannon Lohr. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or family member who you know needs to hear it. Here’s to creating a cleaner, more sustainable world for all of us.

SOAP

SUNSCREEN

BOTOX

MOISTURIZER

SKINCARE

ENCORE: Sustainable Fashion

Product Recommendations

Episodes Mentioned

Source List:

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Season One Finale

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Mascara

Product Recommendations

Episodes Mentioned

Sources

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Tampons

Product Recommendations

Sources

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PSA

Product List

Sources

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