Toxins in Toiletries, or T-in-T

I'm working on reducing the amount of toxins in my environment. Made a list of all of the toiletries I use on a regular basis - and was quite surprised at how many products I use. At any rate, the process for assessing them went like this:

• Look up each product at the Environmental Working Group's "Skin Deep" website: www.cosmeticsdatabase.com. If you don't find your product, become a registered member (free) and you will be able to enter the data from your products and receive a preliminary report/score. I'm aiming for scores of no more than 3. You can also look at scored products in their database by category and sort on product name and score. Very helpful.
• If you decide to try a different, safer product, you can go to www.beautypedia.com (free through the end of February 2011) and learn about the product's efficacy there. That site also has a good ingredients encyclopedia. You can read reviews of products, but note that the reviewers are not concerned about parabens and the like, so a happy face rating does not mean that a product is safe, just that these expert reviewers find that it is effective at whatever it promises.
• If you want to know what other consumers think of the product, there are a number of good review sites, including www.amazon.com, www.drugstore.com, www.makeupalley.com, and others. At makeupalley you can filter reviewers by age group, which is nice; it's a very helpful site with lots of active members and probably worth registering at (free).

Another good website which rates not only the product on its toxicity but also the manufacturer on their footprint is www.goodguide.com, which rates all manner of products, including cleaning products.

In case you are interested, I'll try to figure out a way to easily post the "safe" products I'm using, so check back.