Now, this is one area where making a difference to the world intersects with making a difference to yourself.
Especially if you are woman.
Who doesn’t wish to look great? Sure, not every one of us is a Priyanka Chopra, so yes, we need the help of personal care products to make us look good.
And well, beauties like Priyanka Chopra might actually be using a lot more personal care products than the ordinary looking women around – talk of irony!
And today, the world has turned so topsy turvy that men could be purchasing more cosmetic products than women. Man, where exactly are we headed?
Our specialty focus areas include 
Anyway, my job here (or anywhere else) is not to cleanse the world of vain people, but to ensure that we jerks do some things well.
So, let’s get back to the use of cosmetic products to make us feel good and make our skin and other stuff healthier.
But what if we are choosing products that could end up doing the exact opposite, or worse?
This indeed could be happening owing to the chemicals and sometimes plastics that are being used in a range of cosmetics. And given that our skin is a super sensitive thing (far more sensitive than your floor, for instance 🙁 ), you can well imagine the harm that the wrong chemicals in your cosmetics could do to you.
Take microbeads in cosmetics, for instance. These very small, microsized pieces of plastic are mainly for exfoliation. But made of plastic, there are many who are not sure about the bad effects these could have on your skin. Ironic, given that the main reason these are used is to make your skin look better.
So, what can be done? We do need something like the microbeads and other chemicals for the cosmetics to do a great job, don’t we?
Yes.
But there could natural, safer alternatives that could do an equally good job.
Going back to the example of microbeads, one alternative that is emerging is to still use microbeads, but use microbeads made of biodegradable plastics instead of from petroplastics.
This has two benefits. One, it is quite likely that plastics made from bio-sources are more beneficial to the skin and do not create same harm as the petroplastic beads.
There’s an additional environmental benefit. The conventional microbeads made of plastic are not degeradable, and they thus end up in the sewage and then in our rivers and oceans. Where they get eaten by all sorts of fish and stuff, which finally end up – in our bodies. So, not only do the microbeads cause cosmetic problems on the outside, they likely will end up causing more harm somewhere inside your bodies too!
