BRANDS I LOVE : ETHIQUE 100% VEGAN, CRUELTY-FREE & PLASTIC-FREE SKINCARE
My Blueland “forever bottle” and Ethique Face Cream.
By now we’re all aware to some extent that the ridiculous amount of plastic we are using is destroying our oceans, making its way into our bodies — and even poisoning the food we eat. It’s so absurd, and at times so abstract, that people have no idea how to react to our “plastic problem” — beyond choosing paper over plastic and even bringing their own recycled and recyclable cloth totes to the market. Me included.
That’s it? That can’t be the extent of our individual efforts. We each have to do more — just a little more.
My niece started an IG page she called @exposingtrash for the purpose of “Exposing of and cleaning litter to promote a cleaner planet.” She asks her 1,587 followers to “post your litter cleanups with our hashtag #exposingtrash & join in!” It’s cool and a lot more than most people are doing.
My niece on her @exposingtrash IG page.
Over the past year, I’ve taken steps to curtail my plastic usage to try to make a more positive and meaningful impact. I try to absorb and process as much information as I can from articles, websites, and television programs about the effects of plastic on our world. I’ve also been paying close attention to what consumer brands are doing to help slow our use of plastics and clean up the mess they bear a lot of the responsibility for creating.
I love the website The Story of Stuff; their piece on The Problem With Plastic breaks it down so well:
“For too long, the public conversation around plastic has been narrowly focused on plastic waste in the ocean. While marine debris is indeed a serious part of the problem, this limited focus leaves too much of the story untold. Plastic isn’t just a problem when it enters the environment as waste. Rather, plastic pollutes at every step of its life.”
Those steps include: extraction, production, consumption and disposal.
“Plastic stays around for hundreds of years or more. Unfortunately, only 9% of the plastic ever produced gets recycled; the majority ends up in landfills or in the environment. In fact, 8 million tons of plastic enters our waterways each year. All that plastic is starting to show up in unexpected (and unwelcome) places, from our tap water to our food. The “smog” of microplastics in our ocean is smothering the small organisms that make up the base of the food chain, and could have serious implications for our food systems.”
- The Story of Stuff Project
To help curtail my own role in the plastic problem, I began to engage with and subscribe to a household cleaning brand called Blueland. Blueland has a unique proposition: that “a cleaner planet starts at home.” Catchy enough. For $29.99 they get you started with a complete cleaning kit — everything the average person needs to clean their home, responsibly, economically and sustainably.
In the Blueland kit, you receive three “forever bottles” made of 100% BPA-free recyclable plastic bottles and three cleaning tablets — one for cleaning glass, one for the bathroom, and one for multi-purpose use like wiping down the kitchen counters.
You drop the corresponding colored tablet into the matching blue, pink or yellow bottle, fill it with water and you have a non-toxic cleaning solution in a bottle designed for permanent use. In that moment, you curtail your own plastic waste.
When you start running low on a particular cleaning product, you simply hit up Blueland and they ship you new tablets. Your forever bottles replace the plastic you’d be wasting by buying an entirely new bottle of shower cleaner, counter cleaner or glass cleaner once every other month. Over the course of a year, I estimate that I’ve refrained from adding about a half dozen or so plastic bottles to the environment by using the Blueland service. Is it enough? I don’t know — but imagine if more of us were doing something similar?
But yeah, I had to do more.
So you can imagine how excited I was to discover a skincare brand that uses no plastic at all. I’m not talking about microplastics like Polyethylene that are commonly found in skin- and haircare products. I’m talking about a brand that uses no plastic for jars, bottles or tubes! You’ll also find no glass.
Ethique’s sampler collection includes skincare bars for cleansing, moisturizing and exfoliating.
Meet Ethique!
New Zealand-based Ethique makes moisturizers, serums, cleansers, deodorants and even shampoo and conditioner in cool miniature solid bars. The products are then wrapped in paper and sold in cardboard boxes. Nary a bit of plastic in sight. That just amazes me.
I first came across Ethique in the same place I’ve discovered so many amazing indie skincare brands — on the pages of Beauty Independent. That’s where I found both clean beauty brands Codex Beauty and Solara Suncare. (Stay tuned for upcoming Skincarma Blog articles on each!)
So there I was on the cross-trainer at six in the morning when I opened up my iPad and came across an article on the Beauty Independent site titled, Ethique Is Leading The Plastic-Free Beauty Movement Around The World. I almost fell off the machine!
In addition to an introduction to the brand, the article included an inspiring interview with the brand’s founder and formulator, Brianne West.
In it, she mused about her seemingly wild idea for starting a plastic-free brand to begin with. Before founding Ethique in 2012 with bars of shampoo and conditioner, West had created, nurtured and sold two businesses — one a skincare brand, the other a chocolate brand.
But Brianne West longed to do something more substantive than she had done with those earlier endeavors.
“I was quite bored. They had no point beyond making money, and that’s not my main driver. I wanted to do something positive for the environment. That’s why Ethique came about. The idea of creating the world’s most sustainable cosmetic company was really appealing.”
- Brianne West, Founder of Ethique
Ethique’s brand credo establishes them as vegan, cruelty free and plastic free!
Personally, I was so intrigued by what I was reading that I stopped about halfway through the article to begin to engage with Ethique through the brand’s Instagram page. I followed them instantly — not something I often do with brands. (They rarely follow back!)
I returned to finish reading the piece on Beauty Independent, then navigated over to the Ethique web site. At the top of the About Us page was a huge 48-point-font headline that read:
How we got here and why we care.
I was hooked. “We’re on a mission to rid the world of plastic waste and we want you to be a part of it.” Seriously, exactly where my own mind was at. I had finally found something that I as a consumer could do to slow the growing plastic problem.
So yes, I wanted to be a part of what Ethique is doing. And to tell as many people as I could.
I’m here to spread the word, to pay it forward — to share what I discovered that morning on the cross-trainer. You can reduce your contribution to the plastic problem. And Ethique is a great place to start. The brand has more than 40 products, but I’ll focus on three skincare products that I’ve had the most fun with. (Psst…I don’t often take off my cap, but you can imagine I don’t have much use for shampoo and conditioner — in any form.)
All of Ethique’s 40 products come in a bar.
Here are the three Ethique products I’ve been playing with over the last couple of weeks — a facial cleanser, moisturizer and serum. All of them in cute mini bars that really last and seem to pack a punch.
In Your Face Face Cleansing Bar for Oily-Normal skin
I started with the one of the three Ethique cleansers. It seemed like the easiest to understand, the most familiar to me. Like many people, my first-ever cleansing bar was that classic Clinique Facial Soap. So old school. I had no idea at the time how stripping it was. In fact, I loved that it made my skin squeak. That meant it was actually clean! How naive.
Fast forward about 100 years and here I am using a facial cleansing bar that’s virtually the opposite of that first experience — one that’s vegan, non-toxic, pH-balanced and literally soap-free. The only thing it strips is the plastic that other cleansers come packaged in.
You simply wet your palms and massage the In Your Face bar between them to create a super light cleansing lather. It’s the perfect first-cleanse in the morning, or after I come back up from the gym. But where I like using it most is as part two in my afternoon double cleanse. It feels like it was made for that!
In Your Face seems on the face of it to be a simple formula, comprised of just 12 ingredients, including Coconut Oil, Cacao Butter, and Castor Oil, a vegetable oil rich in fatty acids that’s even more of a classic than that Clinique soap — and that I remember having around the house as a kid.
The more intriguing ingredient to me, at number two in the INCI, is Sodium Chloride — which the brand qualifies as sea salt. It serves to thicken the cleansing lather a bit and can have a mild exfoliating effect. Ethique included it here, too, for its apparent benefits on oily or problematic skin.
Four cleansing bars cost $17.
The Perfector Solid Face Cream
Okay, this was always going to be the product I was most dying to try. A solid face cream is nothing I’ve ever seen before. But I had imagined something like this was possible and that someone, somewhere was going to make it.
Ethique made it.
The Ethique Perfector solid face cream is literally unlike any moisturizer I’ve ever experienced. The only thing that even comes close is the original Dr. Jart Ceramidin Oil Balm. Since discontinued, that balm was the bomb. In the dead of winter, when temps in NYC hovered around zero degrees Fahrenheit, only Ceramidin Oil Balm stayed on my face to protect my skin from moisture loss.
Ethique’s clean, non-toxic Perfector isn’t as thick and occlusive as the Dr. Jart formula, but it’s just enough. The first time using it is a shot in the dark. You gotta adjust how much you apply as you get used to it. I wasn’t sure how thick it would be, how much my skin needed, and how well it would spread on the skin. I know now that a little goes a long way!
I believe there are actually two ways you can apply it. First, you can massage the bar directly onto your cleansed, damp skin. Then, gently press the oil-based formula into facial skin with your palms. Personally, I prefer using it another way — by warming it up in my palms first, then pressing the product into my skin after. The Perfector is made with 18 ingredients, notably Kokum Butter, Babassu Seed Oil, Sunflower Seed Wax, Lecithin and Jojoba Esters — a mix of esters from jojoba oil and hydrogenated jojoba oil that has a wax-like texture and an occlusive quality. Ethique also added Tapioca Starch to the formula to enhance delivery of the key actives into the skin.
My journey with The Perfector has evolved as it’s gotten chillier in New York City. The change of seasons has been the perfect time for me to test a solid moisturizer, giving me the opportunity to monitor how my skin feels wearing it on both warmer days and cooler ones.
For sure, it keeps skin moisturized. It’s far more comfortable on cooler days when my skin needs more moisture and can handle a thicker formula. On the warmer days, I can feel it on my skin for an extended period of a few hours. This is going to be a terrific moisturizer for me in the upcoming winter months.
Three moisturizer bars cost $30.
**WATCH MY VIDEO REVIEW OF ETHIQUE’S 100% PLASTIC-FREE VEGAN SKINCARE ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL HERE.**
Saving Face Serum Bar for Normal to Dry Skin
I am always leery of serums and toners that aren’t in liquid form. The whole idea of a toner is to hydrate and dampen skin to aid absorption of the serums and essences that follow in a healthy skincare routine. Similarly, serums are nearly always in liquid form, usually water-based but sometimes formulated with heavier oil molecules. Serums need to be lightweight to deliver actives more effectively.
So I questioned the idea behind Ethique’s solid Saving Face Serum from the get-go. In much the same way I think that the Blithe solid Tundra Chaga Pressed Serum is mis-named, I don’t believe this to be a serum in the widely understood meaning of the word serum. Saving Face Serum is more like a lighter version of The Perfector facial moisturizer.
Saving Face is a much simpler formula and no where near as occlusive as the solid face cream. It contains just eight ingredients, six of which are botanical oils or butters.
Ethique gets it. They recommend two ways to use it: “either as a nutrient and hydration booster under your normal face cream or as your only moisturiser.” For now, I’ve been using it separately and actually like it more than the face cream when the temps are in the 60s or above. It feels super comfortable on skin when used alone. When I’ve layered it, it just feels like too much. Again, that will change as it gets colder.
Three serum bars cost $27.
I’m so intrigued by what Ethique has done — it’s truly a dream come true. Please check out their website, read the Beauty Independent piece and explore Blueland, too. You and I can and need to do more to curtail our use of plastics.
Take a look around you and imagine doing that little bit extra…
🖤 SKINCARMA
**WATCH MY VIDEO REVIEW OF ETHIQUE’S 100% PLASTIC-FREE VEGAN SKINCARE ON MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL HERE.**
The Ingredient List of the Ethique In Your Face Face Cleansing Bar:
Cocos nucifera (coconut) oil, sodium chloride (sea salt), water (aqua), sodium hydroxide, Theobroma cacao (cocoa) butter, Ricinus communis (castor) oil, Citrus reticulata (mandarin) essential oil, Citrus sinensis (sweet orange) essential oil, mica, citral, limonene, linalool.
The Ingredient List of the Ethique The Perfector Solid Face Cream:
Water, jojoba esters, ethyl macadamiate, Garcinia indica (kokum) butter, Orbignya oleifera (babassu) seed oil, cetyl alcohol, stearyl alcohol, polyglyceryl-4-oleate, tapioca starch polymethylsilsesquioxane, Helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed wax, lecithin, sodium lactate, Undecane and tridecane, panthenol (Vitamin B5), hyaluronic acid, benzyl alcohol, dehydroacetic acid, magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt)
The Ingredient List of the Ethique Saving Face Serum Bar:
Theobroma grandiflorum (cupuacu) butter, Garcinia indica (kokum) butter, Rosa canina (rosehip) oil, jojoba esters, stearyl alcohol, Euphorbia cerifera (Candelilla) wax, Punica granatum (pomegranate) oil, Butyrospermum parkii (shea) butter.
