Look and feel your best without compromising Mother Earth’s beauty.
By Penny K
Big corporations that mass produce health and beauty products will often tell you that what they offer is the best way to go – only that they may not be the most sustainable options around. Looking and feeling your best at the expense of the earth is not wise considering we’re looking at serious environmental threats manifested in the form of melting ice caps, rising sea levels and natural disasters of all kinds.
To create a lighter footprint on the earth, here are 3 pointers to keep in mind when going about your health or beauty routines:
1. Purchase domestically produced goods 
As far as possible, try to purchase goods that are produced locally. By buying local foods, for instance, we minimise “food miles” or the distance the food would have to travel had we imported it instead. Locally produced foods provide the comfort of knowing where they come from which means no need to worry too much about finding melamine in your food. Some may say this isn’t practical considering Singapore’s weather isn’t suitable for farming and if we ate locally produced foods only we’d end up eating bean sprouts all year round. That’s not entirely true; we produce a range of hydroponically grown greens that are none too bad. Anyhow, when purchasing imported foods, be sure to look out for the “fair trade” varieties to ensure that what you’re paying for goes into the fairly paid pockets of hardworking farmers in developing countries.
Organic food costs more than conventional food because the organic price tag more closely reflects the true cost of growing the food: substituting labor and intensive management for chemicals, the health and environmental costs of which are borne by society. These costs include cleanup of polluted water and remediation of pesticide contamination.
2. Opt for or
ganic products that have natural, non-toxic ingredients
You are what you eat and what you use, so why not pay more attention? Be sure of what goes into into your mouth and onto your skin – being cheap doesn’t make being toxic acceptable, neither does high costs guarantee that it’s going to be good for you. Also bear in mind the material of a product’s packaging; whether or not it is recyclable and thus sustainable.
3. Buy clothes from clothing resellers such as consignment sto
res
If you find recycling paper and tin cans a chore then this is a form of recycling that’s surely more appealing – shopping! Visiting local flea markets and even buying real vintage pieces are forms of recycling. Wearing what they call preloved clothes no longer carries a stigma; the practice is commonplace these days. With the fashionably adventurous bunch buying into this lifestyle more than anyone else, you’d probably be able to get good flea finds as kindly contributed by these green fashionistas.
Synthetic (man-made fibres) products will not decompose, and while woolen garments do decompose, they produce methane gas which causes global warming.
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