Plastic has left the chat

You may be noticing a disturbance in the force surrounding natural personal care lately and we have something to say about that. 

Water, plastic, and preservatives - you got no business here. Toxic sulfates and other vile ingredients? Nobody likes you - toodaloo! Enter the Spinster Sisters Free From collection that answers the question “why use and ship all that water and have my pocketbook and the planet pay the price?” Exit all that naughty stuff.

Our new line of sustainable face, body, and hair care products is a revolution for truly clean beauty that is plant-based and actually effective from your noggin to your pinky toes.

Did you know that over 22 billion plastic bottles ended up in landfills last year alone? 8.8 million tons of plastic wound up in our oceans. There, it gets ingested by marine life as microplastics, and then ends up in our own stomachs. Ugh! Talk about a nasty lifecycle! We know the beauty industry can make a dent in those numbers and we’re ready to ramp up the part we play.

PEACE OUT, PLASTIC! 8,856 Bottles down and counting!

That’s where the Free From collection comes in to make your face, body, and hair feel magical while giving your mind, heart, and soul a sense of peace. Our solid shampoos and conditioners have been going strong since 2014 and then completely exploded with growth in 2020. This year alone (YTD as of 10/25/21) you’ve helped keep 8,856 plastic bottles from being used for shampoo and conditioner. Typical liquid shampoos contain between 75% and 80% water. So you also saved 553 gallons of water, a precious resource that’s in peril. Why fill plastic bottles with mostly water just to pay extra for shipping that takes up more space and creates more carbon emissions? 

Instead, we concentrate all the goodness down to the actually effective ingredients and craft solid bars free from wicked ingredients like sulfates, parabens, and nasty preservatives. And of course we’re always free from cruelty! With the hair care success, we know you’ll also find something to love in the rest of our new and revolutionary solid bars. 

Face care? Got it! Our new Daily Glow Face Cleansing Bar with turmeric + our Daily Glow Face Serum Bar with hyaluronic acid and blue tansy are the dynamic duo your face needs to radiate its natural brilliance. 

Sugar Scrubs? Oh baby! Now you can exfoliate and moisturize as easily as washing your body with a bar soap. These gentle scrubs are free from all the same naughties as the rest of the line, but are also free from the usual sugar scrub messiness. Some of us Sisters can get a little lazy and skip this step in our beauty routine more often than we’d like to admit. These are the sugar scrubs we’ve been waiting for! Now with every shower we’re feeling soft and glorious and get to breathe in our favorite calming and comforting scents: Lavender and Oatmeal, Milk & Honey.

Body Butter Bars? OMG! When we discontinued our body lotion bar, we nearly had an employee uprising. Luckily, we had these babies on the horizon to come in and take their place in our hearts, and more importantly, on our bodies. Now our luxurious body butters are available in solid form in the same delicious scents as the Sugar Scrub bars: Lavender and Oatmeal, Milk & Honey.

Deodorant too? Hell yeah, hippy! We think it’s pure pit perfection, and this tubeless deodorant is scented with the same essential oils you know and love from our wildly popular hand sanitizers - Peppermint Tea Tree and Lavender Lime. Smooth it on, feel the softness, and go about your day with the confidence of a planet saving superhero. 

How many bottles will the #spinsterhood keep from landfills and oceans with this new line? How about water? We can’t wait to hear how you love them and share our progress with you. We recommend turning off the water while you cleanse your hair and body in order to save this precious resource but know that’s not always realistic. Do you have a quick shower routine or other ideas that save water? We’d love to hear about them and share any tips with our ‘hood. Please drop ‘em in the comments below or give us a shout here.

Exfoliating and moisturizing with sugar scrub just got got super clean and simple!

For Facts' Sake

Have you seen and heard the word “sustainable” so much that it’s lost all meaning? Like, is it literally just absolutely disrupting your amazing existence at the end of the day? We get it. And it’s not just the proliferation of its usage, but the maddening greenwashing that goes along with it. We’ll brook no BS. We’ve had sustainability at the heart of our mission from the time Kelly conceived this business, and we have no intention of abandoning it. We try to be completely transparent when we talk about it to illustrate what exactly we mean and what exactly we’re doing to live up to our sustainable commitments. 

Leveling up with Sisters

Did you know we’re almost ten years old? All these years we’ve avoided using sulfates, phthalates, parabens, PFAS, petrochemicals, and dyes in our products and opted instead for effective and beneficial plant-based ingredients. When it comes to our packaging, single use plastics have always been a no-no, instead leaning into biodegradable, recyclable, and compostable choices. But we’re always looking for more ways to reduce our impact on the planet and help our customers do the same, while still maintaining our reputation for natural products that actually work wrapped up in a beautiful brand. 

Liquid products like lotion and serum require packaging that will keep them contained, which is why we’ve always gone with recyclable plastics like HDPE ♴ and PET1 ♳. That said, only 9% of all plastic waste ever produced has been recycled. Whether or not the recyclable plastics make it to the right bins, they may not get recycled for a number of reasons. What isn’t complicated here is that math – 91% of plastics are just piling up in landfills and taking centuries to decompose. What’s more complicated is trying to figure out which plastics you can recycle, how to correctly recycle them in your area, and what actually happens to them when you do your part to get them to the recycling center in the communicated way. 

 

Which feels better, joining the movement to do better for the planet or the luxury of the Free From products?

Nobody can do everything but we can all do something

While it’s absolutely important for each of us to do our part as individuals and manufacturers, the problem goes deeper than that. As discussed with his well researched material on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver managed to make the growing plastic pollution crisis more palatable using his typical witty delivery. In between humorous bits, he describes how “real behavior change has to come from plastics manufacturers themselves. Without that, nothing significant is going to happen. We have to make them internalize the costs of the pollution that they are creating. And there is a way to do this, through a concept called “extended producer responsibility” or “the polluter pays principle… EPR laws could, among other things, force companies to either create the infrastructure and markets to recycle the products they make, or force them to stop making them altogether. The U.S. is one of the only developed countries on earth without a national EPR law addressing packaging.” Maine and Oregon have recently passed EPR for Packaging laws, and the United Nations just wrapped up its Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26).

A good amount of attention and planning at COP26  focused on clean energy transition, which is great, but advocates want more emphasis placed on circular economy progress – reusing and recycling goods, and preventing waste in the first place. Because guess what? When we use less plastic, we have less plastic to discard. Duh! Whether you actively monitor and decrease your plastic usage or just try to do your best, you won’t be filling those recycling bins so fast. 

It ain’t just roads, bridges, and broadband, baby

And you know what else just happened? The United States Congress passed H.R.3684 - Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act – historic bipartisan legislation that is being signed into law by President Biden today. Perhaps you’ve heard the amount of 1.2 TRILLION WITH A T being bandied about as the total cost of this bill. How much of that has anything to do with this post? We scoured the text and found a sexy little portion called Section 70402, which actually contains a version of the RECYCLE Act. It provides $15,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2022 through 2026 as grants for recycling education and federal procurement with guidelines designating products containing recycled materials. The EPA is also tapped to develop a toolkit for increasing participation in recycling programs. 

Sure, 90 million is a teeny fraction of the total bill but, hey, gotta start somewhere! And we still have the possibility of even more transformational climate investments (over $500 Billion!) in HR.5376 - Build Back Better Act. We’re eagerly watching to see what happens as this “human infrastructure” bill progresses. 

We're psyched to be a part of this exciting movement with you!

We all live on this beautiful planet and need to preserve it as best we can. We’re super excited about this Free From collection launch and to see what kind of difference we can make together. While this line may not take us from small business to household name all at once, we’re growing with you on our team while doing right and trying to make a difference. We're so glad to be in this #Spinsterhood with you!

As always, we'd love to see your thoughts in the comments here and on social!