Ways To Make Your Beauty Regime More Sustainable
From ditching plastic packaging to giving up your face wipe habit, there are plenty of ways to make your beauty regime more sustainable.
We’ve pin pointed some of the ways to make more conscious choices when it comes to your skincare regime and makeup bag, plus handpicked our favourite brands doing sustainability well.
Ditch one use products
You’ve switched your bottle water habit to a refill but have you ditched your face wipe habit? Shame on you. Not only are wipes terrible for your skin – any skincare specialist will tell you it’s all about the double cleanse – but they are awful for the environment too. In fact 7.6 billion pounds of wipes are thrown into landfill each year which equates to a ghastly 20 million makeup wipes a day.
Ditch the wipes and buy some muslin cloths to remove makeup, swap your cotton wool pads for reusable pads and shop biodegradable bamboo and cotton swabs instead of plastic buds.
And if you’re a fan of the sheet mask (trust us, we love one as much as the next beauty junky) consider more sustainable options from the likes of Maskologist, Orgaid or Dr Dennis Gross – look for compostable or biodegradable on the packaging. L’Oreal do a great reusable sheet mask, too.
Buy refills where possible
Cutting the amount of packaging used in beauty can significantly help get you on track to a more sustainable regime. There are plenty of brands doing their bit with refillable packaging, from tan brand Isle of Paradise to cool haircare brand Ouai and Fenty’s SPF-packed daily moisturiser. Even Charlotte Tilbury has a refillable lipstick – the Hot Lips sticks are available exclusively on CharlotteTilbury.com and in Charlotte’s standalone stores, and can be interchanged with any of the five refillable Hot Lips 2 designs.
Recycle your empties
Plenty of brands have in-store initiatives to get you coming back for more than just a new lippy.
L’Occitane will accept any empty beauty product in any of their stores no matter the brand and will give you 10% off your next L’Occitane purchase. & Other Stories do the same for their own brand beauty products and will give you a 10% discount voucher to use in store within three months. The Body Shop encourages customers to use their Return. Recycle. Repeat scheme, and return any five empty bottles, tubs, tubes or pots to be repurposed and recycled into raw materials for new ones. And makeup junkies should take advantage of MAC’s Back to Mac offering – bring back six MAC containers to a counter or store, and you’ll get a free MAC lipstick.
And for bottles, tubs and tubes that won’t get you discounts or freebies in-store, make sure you’re doing your bit at home. Answer honestly: do you always put your beauty empties in the recycling? Make sure you have a dedicated recycling bin in the bathroom or under your dressing table to remind yourself to recycle where possible.
Buy bigger and better
Stock up on jumbo size bottles of your most used products where possible – this trick is particularly helpful when it comes to regularly used shampoo and conditioner – and ditch buying smaller bottles so often. You may be dropping more cash up front but they tend to be more cost effective in the long run, plus you’ll need to stock up less frequently. Win win all round.