I shave my face most mornings. The main reason is to avoid scratching the face of my young children, when I give them a big hug 🙂 The unfortunate part is that each time I am shaving, I notice the shaving cream, made up of some rather complex chemicals, getting rinsed down the drain. You know where that ends up, right? Well in my case, it would end up in Lake Ontario. This is the exact same body of water where I get my drinking water. Yikes.
So at first I started growing a beard. My kids didn’t care for it. Also it started getting itchy after two weeks or so. So I decided to try shaving with just a bit of bar soap rubbed on my face. The soap appeared to have fewer, and less dangerous sounding chemicals. But even the “gentle” soaps often have parfum or fragrance. It turns out that the manufacturers can hide all sorts of man made chemicals under that “one ingredient”. Some of them have not been tested for safety, some are known to not be safe!
So for the past few days, I have been shaving with just water. And you know what? I didn’t notice any difference with the end result, other than the lack of the artificial scent. My skin was not more irritated or dry. Sure, it didn’t feel quite as slippery while I was shaving, but I had to ask myself:
Is it worth putting random chemicals in my drinking water, in my kids drinking water, so that my razor glides just a little bit smoother when I shave?
Heck no.
Wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of animals going extinct, products like shaving cream went extinct instead?
I encourage you to try shaving without any products. See if you can handle it.