Toxic exfoliators

Exfoliating your skin is essential to a healthy beautiful looking skin as it gets rid of dead skin cells. Exfoliation means unclogging your pores and uncovering fresh new skin cells. It is also essential in your fight against wrinkles and acne. Point is you really should be exfoliating your skin at least once a week no matter what your skin type and age. However, you should be banning all exfoliating creams that contain microspheres. These microspheres are indeed made of polyethylene, in other words plastic, and these are an ecological disaster for the planet. As you rinse your skin after your scrub, these microspheres wash down into our sewing system and as they are too small for the water treatments plants to catch them, they end up in our oceans, where fish eat them thinking they are plankton. And that fish ends up in your plate, and then in your body. So even if the plastic microspheres may not be toxic to your skin directly, they are toxic for you and every other living creature on this planet.

So what safe alternatives are there?

1. There are thousands of natural and simple alternatives. One of them being the konjac sponge which you might be familiar with if you follow Happily Green Ever After.
2. Other cheap and natural alternatives easily found in your kitchen are sugar, salt, grounded coffee, oatmeal, and grounded almonds, which are all biodegradable and exfoliate just as well. You can simply use them alone with a bit of water.
3. Another option is using fresh lemon juice, which you apply on a clean face and try to leave on for up to 10 minutes (it itches!). Rinse well and apply a calming face cream or oil afterwards. Lemon will leave your skin bright and radiant. However, do not put your face in the sun for the following 12 hours, as lemon makes your skin photosensitive. Also, do not use lemon if you have very dry skin, very sensitive skin or rosacea.

Note: These exfoliation alternatives can be used on your face as well as on your body. And the ingredients can also be mixed together: you could mix the salt and lemon together for example, or add honey to the sugar, etc