Cosmetic Ingredients to Avoid

Beauty , Consumerism 1 Comment »

Natrue has recently published their list of Top 10 ingredients to avoid in Natural Cosmetics while David Suzuki has his Dirty Dozen.

The Natrue list:

  1. Any ingredient featuring the word ‘parabene’
  2. Triclosan
  3. Any ingredient featuring the three capital letters ‘PEG’  
  4. Paraffinum Liquidum
  5. EDTA
  6. Phenoxyethanol
  7. Chlorine
  8. Quaternium
  9. Any ingredient featuring the word ‘…propyl…’
  10. Methicone

 

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The Story of Cosmetics

Beauty , Consumerism No Comments »

The Story of Cosmetics is an enlightening insight into the world of big cosmetics from the team at The Story of Stuff

 

Luxury and Waste of Life

Luxury , Musings , Social Responsibility 3 Comments »

I've always felt that the small group of us working at championing a more sustainable form of luxury have been working in a kind of bubble which is only now beginning to scratch the surface of public conciousness. But imagine the solitude that Edward J. Urick must of found himself in when writing "Luxury and Waste of Life". A book which discusses the luxury industry and asks whether the money spent on luxury couldn't be better served by being spent on community focused projects as well as the motives related to the consumption of luxury.

But what make's this work on luxury intriguing is that it was written in 1908! I hope that this is not a statement on the fact that we will always be fighting a never ending battle. 

 

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James Lovelock at the Southbank

Environment , Musings No Comments »

Thanks to Jason, I've just come back from the discussion between James Lovelock and Sir Crispin Tickell at the Southbank Centre where there were some interesting comments from the father of the Gaia Theory on Climate Change and man's relationship to it.

Lovelock opened the talk by raising the complaint that climate scientists, or indeed many scientists, get so carried away in their modelling that they forget the real world....

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The Nature of Things

Design , Luxury No Comments »

 

When I was growing up, my parents frowned quite heavily on too much TV. We didn't even own a colour TV until sometime in the 80s, but I didn't really notice as I allowed my imagination to "see colours" where there weren't any. Although this did make for interesting conversations in the school yard when I was sure that the spaceship in whatever child's cartoon series was popular at the time was red, when really it was blue...

Other than my 30 mins of TV I was allowed to watch upon returning from school, my parents did encourage me to watch educational programs which I can honestly say did make a positive impact and was almost as exciting to a ten year old boy as epic space battles. One of the shows we would watch religiously was the CBC's "The Nature of Things", a series exploring science and later the environment, which was presented by David Suzuki, a man whom I admire very much and certainly helped shape my life. I think it was probably his unknowing influence together with that of my sister that originally shaped my desire to be a biologist those so many years ago.

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