I am extremely in to new and exciting tech tools that can help make my life a little easier, whether it’s meal planning, productivity (or lack thereof – I’m looking at you, Candy Crush), for my business, or for my health and wellbeing. I am also into clean/green living when possible so I’m always on the hunt for natural beauty and cleaning products. Up until now, I have found it tough to keep track of the evil ingredients in all those thousands of beauty products on the shelves, and have considered myself covered as long as I stick to the ‘natural’ and ‘sulphate-free’ iterations of my favorite products.

Enter ‘Think Dirty‘, a handy little app that you can take with you to the drugstore or beauty counter that helps you too see exactly how good or bad a specific product is for you with the scan of a bar code. It’s interface is extremely user-friendly, and it lets you keep a list of all the good and bad products on your bathroom shelf. Each product is rated on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being extremely natural and neutral, 10 being the most harmful). Considering I tend to be quite mindful of the products I use, I was SHOCKED to learn that 99% of the products in my bathroom (including my ‘all-natural’ hand soap) rated a 9 or 10 on the Think Dirty scale. Even those products that claimed to be ‘green’, ‘natural’, ‘Paraben-free’, etc. were packing their ingredient list with tons of other evil toxins. In fact, the only brands that rated around a 1 were Dr. Bronner’s and J.R. Watkins, two brands that are proudly all-natural. Every other (I repeat, every single other) big name drugstore brand in my bathroom rated off the charts for either carcinogens or developmental/reproductive toxins.

Think Dirty calculates that women use an average of 12 products per day (with men using an average of 6). That’s an annual average of over 4,300 applications and exposure to tens of thousands of chemicals within that year. It’s safe to say I’ll be over-hauling my medicine cabinet this week with the help of the Think Dirty app. Will you?

xo Ali