First and foremost, The Detox Market is having their 5th Birthday Sale.  Get 15% off your entire order of $100+ with code DETOXBDAY between now and November 5th at 11:59pm PST.  All of the Bare Beauty Swaps, below, are available there.  🙂

If you didn’t see Bare Beauty Swaps Vol. 1, check it out here.  Friends, family and readers alike are always asking me for easy, Green replacements for their old standbys.  I can name a lot of them right off of the top of my head, so I decided to make this a regular column at Bare Beauty.  I hope you can benefit from it, and please, let me know what you’re dying to replace!

In a past life, I used Laura Mercier Secret Brightening Powder on the daily!  Instead of setting my under-eye concealer with my mineral powder foundation, I would use this to brighten up my dark under-eye circles (it doesn’t look so matte and dark like a colored mineral foundation does).  I also loved the way it blurred imperfections on the rest of my face when I used it on top of tinted moisturizer or foundation.  Unfortunately, Mercier’s formula contains a host of parabens as well as BHT (another nasty preservative).  These days, I use W3LL PEOPLE Bio Brightener Powder.  It does a beautiful job of softening, blending and blurring, and the totally translucent formula makes all complexions look luminous.  I use it every single day, and when I run out, I panic.

I wore Bare Minerals Loose Powder Foundation for years, but I didn’t realize that what was drying out my otherwise oily skin was the “luminizing” bismuth oxychloride that it contained (which is nontoxic, but it’s wreaking havoc on a lot of women’s sensitive lil’ faces, and they have no idea that it’s the culprit).  W3LL PEOPLE Altruist Mineral Foundation is my go-to these days.  (If you need help finding your shade, try W3LL PEOPLE’S Well-Matched Shade Selector.)  I once asked Shirely Pinkson, the brains behind W3LL PEOPLE, what the key ingredient was that made their mineral foundation so unique.  Her response?  “It’s what we don’t put in them.”  Love that girl.

It’s a W3LL PEOPLE kinda’ day over here…  A reader recently asked for a suitable replacement for her tinted FRESH Sugar Lip Balm.  These lip balms contain the toxic sunscreens Octinoxate and Oxybenzone – they are serious endocrine disruptors.  They also contain BHT and Propyl Gallate, which are carcinogens.  If this is a product that you are applying and reapplying multiple times a day, it is time to say buh-bye.  My absolute favorite tinted lip balm is W3LL PEOPLE’S Nudist Color Balm Stick.  I don’t leave home without it – no, seriously, I double check that it’s in my bag.  The love child of a lipstick and and a lip balm, this product gives you the best of both worlds.  It hydrates beautifully and seams to “seal” in moisture.  The color is subtle, but gives my complexion a boost when I want that no-makeup-makeup look.  My favorite is #7 (Nude), but I also love #2 (Fig), which is a dead-ringer for Clinique’s cult favorite, Black Honey.  Oh, and, they have a sweet, minty flavor.

Don’t forget to enter the code DETOXBDAY for 15% off!

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