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What’s in Aspire Personal Care Products?

At Aspire, we believe in complete transparency of our product ingredients.  Aspire products contain natural ingredients.

We Aspire to Health and Beauty Products That Are Natural and Free of Toxins

     Avoiding toxins in our products is important, so you'll never find toxins in Aspire products.  This is why Aspire products are better for you and better for the environment.  When consumers choose to use products that contain synthetic petrochemicals and toxins, we expose our body and skin to damaging toxins, which absorb through our skin, and accumulate in our tissues.  We also spread the toxins throughout our living spaces, and into the environment when we wash, sending the materials down the drain to the sewer.  Synthetic toxins that don’t biodegrade accumulate outdoors, and are eventually washed to the nearest water body, a stream or lake, through storm drains, contaminating land and water.  Is this fair to fish and wildlife, who depend on clean land and water, and have no control over toxins that we humans choose to use?  We have decimated about 50% of our wildlife in just the past few decades, and dedicating ourselves to using only toxin-free products can help stop this tragic loss of diversity on our planet.

How can we avoid toxins in our personal care products? 

The toxins that are commonly used in wellness, personal care and household products number in the tens of thousands, so, short of taking complicated chemistry classes, it would be impossible to understand them all.  Luckily, there are a few things an ordinary consumer can do to understand the ingredients in the products that they use, and make sure they are free of toxins.

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  1. Find a source for local products.  Most local products are made with natural and non-toxic ingredients.  This is because most people who start these companies simply prefer to craft natural products that are safe for them to make, and good for their customers.  Also, if you have a question about the ingredients, you can simply ask the shop directly.

  2. Read the labels on the products.  The ingredients should be listed on there.  When I say the “should be” listed, I actually used to think that  this was a legal requirement, but it turns out that manufacturers have the option of referring the consumer to a web site or link where the ingredients can be found.  This latter option tends to be leveraged by products manufactured by big corporations, and I get the sense that it’s an effort to make it difficult for the consumer to find out what’s in their products.  Why would I suggest that?  Well, from experience.  I was doing a small study on chemicals in laundry detergents, and I went to Safeway to get ingredients off the labels of the detergents.  I was a little surprised to see that the major products, such as All, Tide and Cheer, tended to have a little note somewhere on the label that provided a web site or link to find a list of ingredients.  Naturally, I wrote those down and looked them up later.  I was somewhat annoyed, but not too surprised, to find that looking them up turned out to be more trouble than I expected.  Some of the links didn’t work, and others took you to places that didn’t have ingredient lists.  Yet more required a lot more digging than necessary, and I had to look in several different places on the same web site, trying to find ingredient lists for specific products.  In several cases, I never found the lists.  Most of the lists I did manage to find had ingredients on there that are blatantly toxic, that I definitely wouldn’t want on or in my body, or in the environment.  The experience makes me want to recommend that the average consumer, who probably doesn’t want to take a doctorate in chemistry to understand what’s in their products, might view products that refer to web sites to find their ingredients in general as an initial red flag, to be suspicious of, to start with.  This could be a simple pre-screening criteria to sort out safe products from those that aren’t so safe.

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There were also several more responsible brands at the Safeway, such as 7th Generation.  Unlike the less responsible products, these products all had the ingredients proudly listed on the label, for consumers to easily see.  The lists of ingredients on these products were pretty much all safe, natural, biodegradable ingredients.  Responsible companies seem to want the consumer to see what's in the product, so that an environmentally responsible consumer can make a sound purchasing decision right there in the store.  This is the way it should be, in my opinion, and the reason Aspire lists all ingredients on the label, and also explains the ingredients in this education section.

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  1. Once you have that ingredient list, you can read the ingredients and see if there is anything in there that you’re not familiar with.  If there is, simply look up the ingredient on the internet and see what you can find out.  Sure, this takes a little time, but it’s worth the effort.  We’re talking about chemicals that we are putting on our bodies, using in our homes, and ultimately releasing to the environment.  This is just as important as researching any purchase you make in life, the food you eat, the next phone, computer or running shoes.  We should be checking into all products we buy, in order to understand their potential impact on our health and the environment, as well as their performance.  This is simply responsible purchasing.

  2. Once you’ve weeded out the irresponsible products, you’ll find that there are plenty of responsible products to choose from.  At this point, the next thing to consider is whether the ingredients are organic and non-gmo.  This is hugely important, because toxins used to grow and produce raw materials that are not organic are a huge contributor to poisons that are killing our wildlife.  Toxins from irresponsible agricultural operations are the biggest contributor to poisons in surface waters, because the poisons ultimately run off from the fields into surface water, and contaminate the entire river system.  Yes, organic might be more costly, but the benefits to our planet are enormous.  And when we pay with our tax dollars to remediate the impacts of toxicity on the environment (think big government reclamation and clean-up projects), we are paying the higher cost, and probably more, anyway.

Aspire Ecofriendly Personal Care Product Ingredients

                Use the drop-down list at the top of the Ingredients tab to get details about the natural ingredients we use in Aspire products, and whether they're organic and non-GMO.  We are also including some information about harmful ingredients that we are choosing to avoid in our products, and why we don't use them.  Finally, we list the sources of our ingredients, because we know that we can reduce the carbon footprint of our products by finding sources that are as close to our manufacturing facility as possible.  And, we support employment in our own country if we can find materials that are made in the U.S.A.  Hopefully this information will be helpful in choosing responsible products.  If we all make responsible consumer choices to buy and use responsible products, it will have a huge positive impact on our planet.  Collectively, we can force the market in a direction that helps, rather than continues, to harm, our planet.

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