I was recently visiting my parents to get a little R&R at their cute little cottage in the woods on a cute little island in the Pacific Northwest.

Sounds idyllic, eh?

However, it wasn't as idyllic a vacation as I thought it would be.

Since I get bored easily (a girl can only play Scrabble and card games with her parents for so long), I had brought along my trusty Mac laptop.

Ok, we Mac-o-philes call them PowerBooks, but that's a whole other conversation.

Miracle of miracles, they get internet access on this island, so one day as I was surfing the net in between Scrabble games, I came across a non-profit organization's website that rates the the safety and toxicity of organic makeup and other mainstream personal care products.

You know, stuff like mascara, shampoo, sunscreen, baby oil, diaper cream...all that gooey and powdery stuff we put on our bodies and our children's bodies on a daily basis.

Now, the average person arriving at this site would probably glaze over at seeing nifty words such as, "neurotoxicity", and "pentaerythrityl tetraisostearate", but it just so happens that besides being a girl geek and a Mac-worshipper, I'm also a bit of a natural health fanatic.

(Ok, maybe not a fanatic; I've loosened up in my older age and do allow myself to fall off the wagon occasionally, especially when it comes to chocolate chip cookies...but I digress).

Anyway, I've known that certain ingredients such as sodium lauryl sulfate are bad for you, so for the last few years I've been using shampoos and toothpaste products from the health food store that are free of that ingredient inparticular.

But it's easy to get complacent and distracted by other things in life, and I hadn't quite gotten to the point of making the 100% switch to organic makeup and other organic products.

Now I'm motivated.

I had my mom bring out the makeup and shampoos and hair coloring products she uses the most, and we looked up some of the ingredients.

To say we were stunned is an understatement.

Even the supposedly "natural" hair color product she bought at the health food store was full of nasty chemicals! It actually rated in the top most hazardous range of toxicity in this website's database!

Out of eight of her products, I think only two of them were acceptable in terms of their hazard level.

So much for a restful vacation!

Now that I'm back at home, I'm going through each of my bottles, tubes, lip balm sticks - everything - and plugging it into this database to find out how toxic or non-toxic they are.

Then I plan to switch over to organic makeup and organic personal care products as soon as I can (after plugging them all into this database, of course).

If you're motivated to start clearing the toxic crap out of your life, may I suggest you go visit "Skin Deep", the cosmetic safety database and start finding alternatives to some of the nasty ingredients in your life.

Let me know what you think of the site. I'd love to hear from others who care about what they put in and on their bodies...even if you're not quite as much of a health-fanatic I am. ;-)