I somehow found Alicia Silverstone’s blog with this post about non-toxic nail polish. That led me to the Zoya site, which linked to the Zoya nail polish exchange!

In a nutshell: You sign up for a free account, and choose the nail polish colors you want. Then you send in your old nail polish bottles, the folks at Zoya (or wherever you are sending them) recycle them properly, and they send you back the polish you picked. You have to send at least 6 bottles, no maximum. It’s $3.50 “shipping” per bottle, but it’s a 1-to-1 exchange, and that’s drug store nail polish pricing so it’s more than fair. (Unless you go for Wet N Wild, or NYC, which are $1 each. But that doesn’t count.)

Since I went through my old products and emptied/rinsed out/recycled the bottles tonight (and I’m sleeping with windows open to air out the apartment, whew!), I set aside all my old nail polish. 22 bottles! Many of them are barely used or unused, because I hate the smell of nail polish in the house and I hate chipping so I don’t do my nails all that often. And because I can’t do my right hand because I’m a righty and my left hand is very unsteady. But anyway, 22 new colors is $77 plus shipping my old polish to them, which won’t be too bad. Considering the same 22 full price at the site is $154, and I’m sure it won’t cost $77 to send my bottles in, and I would have chucked them into the garbage… that’s actually pretty awesome!

Meanwhile, I’m reading Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry, and it’s scary and eye-opening, and is reinforcing my decision to stick to natural products that don’t have even trace amounts of toxic chemicals.

PS – I know I posted pictures the other day of the products I was discarding, but in case you doubted how many bottles I had: after spending two hours dumping contents into the garbage tonight it took another two hours to rinse out the bottles, I had VERY pruny fingers (I’m sparing you the photo I took), and I completely filled a “tall kitchen-size” garbage bag with clean plastic containers… which I promptly brought to the recycling can in the basement, so I guess the time was worth it. Most of all, I feel like I accomplished something huge tonight – at four hours tonight, plus at least 2-3 hours the other day, it was a humongous task! And I feel like I’m doing a small part to help the planet and my health and the health of my future children. (I posted a few updates on the previous post today, so if you’ve already read it click on the word pictures in the beginning of the paragraph to see those.)

I also went through the house and got rid of everything I would possibly eat that has High-Fructose Corn Syrup, which makes lab rats fat (among other things) and has other really bad stuff associated with it. And at the grocery store last Wednesday I bought a reusable bag for $0.99 AND used it today at a different store that gave me a $0.02 credit for using it! So just 49 more uses there and it will literally pay for itself, so that’s pretty cool. Next time I go I will bring all the plastic bags I have saved up and I will put them in the plastic bag recycling box in the front of the store. I’ve been wanting to start using reusable bags for years, so I’m really proud of myself for buying one. Plus now I don’t need a cart or basket, I can put items in the bag while I shop and then I’ll know when it’s too heavy to keep shopping. Yay Earth Day (last Thursday) and yay me for starting to go green, and hopefully I am making some real good, lasting changes in my life.