This App Will Change The Way You Shop For Beauty Products

If you try to avoid chemicals in your beauty goods, chances are you've been frustrated by many brands on their lack of transparency — particularly when it comes to exactly what's in them. Ingredients in beauty products aren't monitored by the FDA, making it almost impossible to tell what you're rubbing into your skin with that so-called "natural" moisturizer. Sifting through options at your local store in search of truly clean products can be so maddening that we've been tempted to give up in the short-term and forget all the long-term consequences of using potentially carcinogenic products.

It was this exact scenario that inspired Lily Tse, an entrepreneur from Toronto, to develop an app that takes the guesswork out of clean beauty shopping. Called Think Dirty, the app lists 68,000 North American and European products and rates them on a "dirtiness scale" from one (being the cleanest) to 10 (being the dirtiest). Tse was motivated to develop the app by her mother, who is a breast cancer survivor. "I pay a lot of attention to food and a lot of other stuff, but then I realized that cosmetics and beauty are like a taboo," she says. Tse is hoping that the app will empower consumers to feel that they can make smart choices — without having to memorize the 3,163 different ingredients that can fall under a "fragrance" labeling on an ingredient list.

Of course, with the rising popularity of this app (which has already been downloaded 70,000 times) and others that rate the "cleanness" of products, there is the hope that brands will be held more accountable and be motivated to use fewer harmful chemicals in their formulas. Wouldn't be nice if, one day, we didn't have to choose between our favorite beauty products and our health? (Fast Company)