Making your beauty routine more eco-friendly can help your self-esteem and wallet as you make a choice that is good for you and the environment. Using reusable cotton rounds is a perfect way to do this and reduce the amount of waste you create.
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This blog post corresponds with my episode 37 of The Beaded Sheep Podcast, giving you all the information you need if you are looking to switch to reusable cotton rounds.
Let's focus on a few questions:
What are cotton rounds? Quite literally, they are circular pieces of cotton that can be made with cotton or cotton fabric/material.
What are cotton rounds used for? Most people use them for makeup removal, skincare routines, and nail care. I would suggest if you wanted to use reusable cotton rounds for nail care, to have some set aside for just that so that you don't get nail product chemicals on your face.
What are the benefits of using reusable cotton rounds? There are so many!! They are more comfortable and soft on the face, plus they don't get little fuzzies stuck in your eyelashes. They are washable and can even be washed throughout one use. When you have a full face of makeup, you can rinse the reusable cotton round off and keep using it as you keep taking off your makeup instead of having to throw multiple away for one time of taking your makeup off. They are easy to travel with and can be left out to dry (or use a hotel/Airbnb dryer to dry one in a pinch) so they aren't wet when you are traveling. They make a great gift for anyone in your life that enjoys some self-care if you wanted to add them to a face mask or lotion.
The main benefit and takeaway is the amount of waste you won't have when you use them. To break it down, I went to my Target app and looked up cotton rounds and found their basic cotton rounds as a reference point. For 100 cotton rounds, they are $1.99. If you were to use one cotton round per day for a year, you would need to buy four packs of these cotton rounds, which total would cost you $7.96/year. The financial cost is not much, but you would be throwing away 365 cotton rounds.
If you were to use two a day, it would come out to $15.92/year and you would be throwing away 730 cotton rounds in a year. It continues to grow if you use more than that in one day (which is entirely possible if you frequently wear a full face of makeup). If you were to use four cotton rounds a day, that is $31.84/year and you would be throwing away 1,460 cotton rounds. That is a ton of waste being thrown into the landfills (and most likely oceans) that could be avoided with reusable cotton rounds, which if taken care of will last you years!
And those financial numbers are just for the basic cotton rounds at Target, which are the cheapest kind you can get. The premium cotton rounds are $2.39 for 100ct., the exfoliating cotton rounds are $3.49 for 100ct., and the organic cotton rounds are $3.99 for 100ct..
How do you take care of your reusable cotton rounds to make them last? If you are taking off a full face of makeup, make sure that you are rinsing as much of the makeup off of your cotton round before throwing it in the laundry as you can. This will keep your makeup from staying in the fabric and clogging it up so that they get a good clean in the laundry. When you launder them, put the cotton rounds with your other reusable cloth items such as cloth napkins, any kind of kitchen towel, hand towels, and face towels. To keep them nice and soft, put them in the dryer (preferably an eco-friendly/low heat setting), but you can let them air dry if you would like a more exfoliating texture. To store them you can stack them together and put them in a cabinet or in a cute clear jar to put on your counter!
I hope this blog post (and podcast episode!) were helpful to educate you on the many benefits of reusable cotton rounds! Be sure to shop the Beaded Sheep cotton round collection, as well as all of the other eco-friendly products on the shop if you are looking to make the eco-friendly switch!
