Protect Your Skin With Fair Trade This Summer

As you get ready to head down to the beach for the first time this year, you'll want to make sure your bag is packed and ready to go with all the things you need to enjoy the day: a big towel, sunglasses, your iPod, a magazine, sun block and perhaps some post-tanning lotion or gel to soothe those painful sunburns. But now, you can protect your skin from the sun and promote fair trade and social accountability at the same time! A win-win in my book.

Skin care products and cosmetics using fair trade ingredients are becoming easier and easier to come by. Many companies like The Body Shop are actively getting involved in the fair trade movement. Using their own Community Trade certification system, The Body Shop spends approximately $11.5 million each year purchasing products, ingredients, and accessories from communities around the world at fair prices to support workers in rural and underdeveloped regions. Their program reaches more than 25,000 workers in nearly 20 countries around the world. The company has a complete line of moisturizers, aloe vera gels, lip balms, and other accessories and cosmetics that feature the Community Trade certification and support fair trade around the world.

You can also support the fair trade movement by purchasing specific products with fair trade certification. Shea Butter, for example, is great for protecting dry, chapped and sun-damaged skin and is often sold fair trade. At the Akoma Cooperative Multipurpose Society in Ghana, fair trade Shea Butter is produced in massive quantities, then distributed around the world and sold with organic and fair trade certification. A great initiative, and certainly not the only one like this out there! You can find the fair trade cream here in the United States at stores like Ten Thousand Villages.

And after a long day out in the sun, what could be better than cooling down with some aloe vera gel on those nasty sunburns? Recently, Florida Food Products, a company specializing in plant extract, partnered with Jan Dekker, a cosmetic ingredients supplier and received the first "Fair for Life" fair trade certification for their aloe vera extract that they now sell to manufacturers around the world. The Institute for Marketecology, an organization based in Switzerland that monitors the production of eco-friendly products and organic agriculture, offers this certification to companies that promote positive relations between producers and buyers. Now all companies that buy Florida Food Products' and Jan Dekker's aloe vera extract have their hand in the fair trade movement.

So by purchasing fair trade certified skin care products this summer, you can not only protect your skin while hanging out at the beach, hiking, running around or otherwise enjoying the beautiful summer we have coming, but you can also support the fair trade movement, giving workers and producers around the world the wages they deserve. So let's all make the commitment to purchase fair trade skin care products this summer. From sun block and lip balm to moisturizers and aloe vera gel, we can all find a way to pitch in.

Photo credit: www.D2k6.es