Ami Zoda

So it's one of the forms of power that were most available to women historically.

And it's impacted by things like colonialism, racism, sexism.

And there is a hierarchy of beauty, like a pyramid.

And it's really driven by Eurocentric notions of beauty that favor lighter skin, straighter hair, thinner bodies.

Simply put, the closer you are to the top of that pyramid...

The greater benefits you'll see, whether it's a higher likelihood of finding a suitable husband in South Asian countries like my native country of India, or in this country, you know, the greater likelihood of getting a certain job if you're a Black woman and you wear your hair straight.

So there are apps that can help you do that.

You could use an app like Cleria, and there you could just take a picture of your ingredient labels, and it'll kind of give you like a...

sort of flag the problematic ones for you.

Skin deep is another one that will give you a score that kind of tells you sort of how hazardous your products are.

And then there's like the campaign for safe cosmetics.

And they have a nice list of some of the most common ones there too.

Well, I'll just take lotion, okay?

Because lotion is one actually that doesn't get enough attention.

But lotion has a lot of preservatives and often it's the preservatives, right?

That give it a longer shelf life that often can be some of the stuff we want to stay away from.

And there is a lot of different lotions.

You know, you can have a lotion that has...

four products, or you could have a lotion that has 50 products, including these formaldehyde releasers.

There's like formaldehyde itself, but then there's like these chemicals that can degrade or release into formaldehyde.