Halloween Make Up

HealthyStuff.org tested halloween make up designed for kids from the shelves of stores in southest Michigan. They were looking for heavy metals, including lead, cadmium, mercury, and arsenic - and found one or more of these heavy metals in all of the 31 Halloween products tested.

Why is this important?

Many of the chemicals detected are potent neurotoxins and carcinogens that can disrupt a child’s development. These products are directly applied to faces!

You can check out each of the individual products tested by visiting HealthyStuff.org.

Here is what they found:

* One in two (52%) of Halloween makeup tested contained detectable levels of cadmium. The highest level of cadmium detected was 455 parts per million. * 100% of the products tested contained chromium
* Other metals detected include: arsenic (29% of the products tested), mercury (13% of the products tested), and lead (3% of the products tested).

I do wish there were an Australian equivalent to tell me if the results here are the same. I assume so, since I can't imagine there are different factories in China churning out a higher quality product for our tiny market.

The palest shade of green

I have made my own laundry powder. How frugal! How green! It's phosphate free and cost a fraction of what the powder from the shops cost. It's made of borax, washing soda and grated soap.

The only downside is that it leaves a soapy residue inside the powder holder on my machine. But since the shop-bought laundry powders and liquids also do that, this isn't that much of a drawback.

I do a lot of washing at the moment. At least one load a day, so this is one tiny contribution to reducing my impact on the environment.

Of course, the bigger way to reduce my impact would be to have a more energy efficient washing machine. Unfortunately I had to buy mine just after the last one blew up, taking the entire wiring of the laundry with it. After paying the $1600 to rewire plus the $200 for the emergency plumbing, I wound up getting a really bottom of the range machine. I've already had to repair it once and it only has 4 stars for energy and 3 for water use.