Everytime I scroll through Instagram, I discover “the latest and greatest beauty secret that I can’t live another day without.” I’d like to think I have some self control, but almost every time I end up falling for the ploy and purchase the so-called lifesaver of a beauty product.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the creams, the serums, the lotions, the masks, the oils – the list goes on. And I always go for the high quality products that I know won’t destroy my skin or hair and be a total waste of money. I think it’s fun to test them all out and find the new go-to secret, but honestly they often times fall flat. They’ll work for a few weeks and I’ll get all excited thinking I’ve found “the one,” but they all end up losing their appeal and the glow or the smoothness fades away.
Admitting to that lack of self control, I wanted to keep up my habits of testing out new products, but I was so sick of trying them out only for them to stop working after sometime. The products I was buying weren’t cheap, and I trusted their ingredients, so what was the issue? My hair continued to feel damaged and weak, and my skin felt perpetually dry. Not only did I want to try and find the right products, I was also starting to get worried that these problems were only getting worse.
More time went on and I started to develop rashes on my body and my hair started to thin out. I was officially scared. I needed to figure out what was causing all of this and why none of my fancy products were able to save it. I got online and learned the one beauty secret that I was missing this whole time: clean water.
I filtered my drinking water everyday, but why wasn’t I filtering the same water that I showered in everyday? I was totally caught off guard. Something as simple as shower water was completely changing not only how my products worked, but my skin and hair entirely. Luckily, I found a free water report to tell me exactly what was in my water – I needed to know the facts.
I typed my zip code in, and learned that my local water sources have arsenic, nitrate and nitrite, chromium (hexavalent), radium, and 1,4-dioxane. I wasn’t even sure what those names were, but I was terrified.
With a little further digging, I also discovered that long term exposure of arsenic can eventually cause cancer and other diseases, nitrates are a product of animal and human waste decomposition, chromium is a chemical used in industrial products that can cause skin reactions, 1 in 10,000 people would develop cancer over a lifetime caused by radium, and 1,4-dioxane is another potential cancer-causer found in groundwater throughout the United States.
Although the US water supplies are considered to be among the safest in the world, more and more contamination is occurring on a rapid basis – cue my scary-sounding water report. All tap water across the country technically must meet the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations, but it’s not as regulated as we think. So many of the standards set by the EPA are decades old, and with growing contamination and pollution, those standards are no longer safe for us anymore. And the gross truth: the contamination causing my beauty issues could have been caused by sewage releases, naturally occurring chemicals and minerals, local land practices like fertilizers and pesticides, manufacturing processes, and malfunctioning septic systems.
At the end of the day, I quickly realized that even though I was careful to buy high-end products with quality ingredients, if the water I was showering in everyday was filled with chemicals and toxins that I was completely unaware of, none of it mattered. My products were never going to work and my hair and skin would remain damaged and dry if I wasn’t careful about my tap water.
If you’re sick of wasting money on a clean beauty routine that doesn’t seem to work, take this free water report and discover the toxins that you might be showering in every day – they might be doing a lot worse to your routine than you think.
