5 Ways to Make the Transition to Clean Beauty

Our advice for choosing which products to swap out first is to choose the ones that touch your skin on a daily basis. These are entering your system more often and might be doing more harm to your body. First swap out your aluminium-based antiperspirant and change to an all-natural deodorant, like Schmidt's sensitive range. Second up is moisturiser and cleanser — they are used daily on your face, sometimes even twice a day, so they should always be a priority. Try Neighbourhood Botanicals Cleanser and then a simple few drops of an oil like jojoba or marula as a moisturiser.

Next is your body wash and body lotion. Again, both of these are used often and should be helping your skin, not harming it. Try the Weleda range: it's affordable and smells great. Lastly, your lip balm and lipstick should be the first things to go in your makeup bag. We ingest these products more often than we realise and they can have some of the highest levels of toxic ingredients in them. Hurraw is a brilliant natural lip balm, and the brand also makes a tinted lip colour that's a great alternative to lipstick too.

We can't stress enough that changing to clean beauty involves you becoming your own teacher and advocate. A lot of information to do with ingredients and chemicals in our products is hard to find and research. More mainstream brands may try and "greenwash" their goods and mislead you into thinking you're buying something clean when you're not. So it's important to learn as much as possible to make the transition easier for you.

The Nature of Beauty by Imelda Burke is a good place to start: it's easy to understand and gives you the power of choice in what you're buying and putting on your skin. Whole Beauty by Shiva Rose is also a great read — it's full of simple DIY beauty recipes, information on products, and helpful tips and tricks from Shiva, all packed into a beautiful book.

Sometimes, the hardest thing is to make the first move. We say go for it. Dive headfirst into nontoxic beauty. There is an abundance of choice and a community of people in the clean beauty world just waiting to give you a hand. The bloggers, brands, makeup artists, and businesses in natural beauty are often willing to give you any help they can. So reach out and ask for it if you need it. Start small, change just one or two products at a time, and keep costs low. Don't overwhelm yourself by setting goals or timelines for when your transition has to be done. Don't punish yourself for still using that nonclean eyebrow pencil if you can't afford a clean version yet. It will all happen; it just doesn't need to be overnight. Read, learn, listen, and then take action. In the words of Kris Jenner, "You're doing great, sweetie".