Can­cer runs in my fam­ily. After find­ing out that another fam­ily mem­ber has been diag­nosed, I have been more vig­i­lant in what I put in and on my body, includ­ing cos­metic products.

Recently, I read the ingre­di­ent label of a rel­a­tively expen­sive cleanser that I just ran out of: Sec­ond ingre­di­ent is Sodium Lau­reth Sul­fate (makes things foamy), at least 3 dif­fer­ent kinds of parabens (acts as a preser­v­a­tive), cush­ioned by other chem­i­cals that I can­not even pronounce.

I wouldn’t be sur­prised if these ingre­di­ents appeared in a cheaper prod­uct, but not on the label of a seem­ingly “gen­tle” facial cleanser that costs close to $30/tube! Unfor­tu­nately, toxic fillers such as SLS, parabens, sul­phates, fragrance/parfum, etc. don’t seem to dis­crim­i­nate based on price tag. Is it too much to ask that good money should also be buy­ing a safer product??

Deter­mined to find a decent cleanser with­out any of this junk, even though there may not be any con­crete links to the C-word, I scoured the drug­store shelves, read­ing count­less labels. One thing that I dis­cov­ered is that the words “nat­ural” or “organic” or any­thing along those green-lines don’t mean a thing! As these buzz-words doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that they’re free of tox­ins. There also doesn’t seem to be any reg­u­la­tions about slap­ping any words, that car­ries cer­tain claims, on bot­tles. So even though some­thing says it’s “100% Nat­ural”, in green font, it actu­ally can be made of 100% petrochemicals.

Even­tu­ally I set­tled on a waterless-cleanser that was on sale from Shop­pers. How­ever, after some googling, I found out that the sec­ond ingre­di­ent was min­eral oil (a.k.a. paraf­finum liq­uidum). After a week of usage, with dis­ap­point­ing results, I finally returned it today for a full refund.

(By the way, Shop­pers does accept full-refunds on opened mer­chan­dise as long as you have the receipt and it’s done within 30 days!)

In order to decide on a cleanser, I have decided to use myself as a guinea pig by test­ing out a sam­ple that I got from Sephora (Kor­res), blend­ing oats to cre­ate a paste, castile soap, olive oil soap, and olive oil, all for 7–10 days each. Hope­fully, I will come to a truly nat­ural, non-toxic cleanser that will work on me!

Do you read labels of cleansers, body washes, shampoo/conditioners that you use?