“A woman should wear fragrance wherever she expects to be kissed”-Coco Chanel
Laura Reynolds looks at some of the cheapest beauty products available
Well, OK, so all those facts have been true for at least the past month, but now it’s official. Today is 1st December and I’m taking every opportunity to tell the world about it – it’s Christmas, people.
I can understand why some people aren’t as keen as I am, though. Our contributions to carbon emissions at Christmas are massive, so it’s understandable that people aren’t wild about an entire month of it. That’s why I’m here to tell you about ways you can make Christmas more eco-friendly this year. This week is about the time of year when everyone I know starts to panic about what to buy everyone they know. So - how do you make your Christmas shopping more eco-friendly?
Buying green gifts is one way to go about it. Giving presents to your friends, your family, their friends and that person from high school who you don’t really know anymore but feel morally obligated to be nice to, is always going to be taxing on your bank account, but it doesn’t have to be taxing on the environment. For a start, you can head down to somewhere like Shared Earth, now with its own Christmas shop – presumably for a limited time only – on Church Street. There you’ll find hand-made, fairly traded and recycled gifts for everyone; the shop stocks everything from jewellery to planes made out of cans, should those happen to appeal to anyone you know.
As an alternative to buying material gifts, there’s the services now offered by charities at Christmas. Instead of giving your girlfriend a pair of fairly standard earrings that you found at the last minute in a chain-store, what about giving her a goat? Not literally, obviously – for a start, it would be fairly hard to wrap, and might knock the tree over if you tried to fit it under there. That’s possibly why (Oxfam Unwrapped) doesn’t make you deal directly with the goat yourself – you pay for it, and they send it to people in countries where it’s needed. Instead of having to wrap a furry thing with four legs and a propensity to eat its own wrapping paper, you get a gift box with magnets, DVDs and other goat-related goodies to give as proof of said goat.
You don’t even have to limit yourself to that – there are plenty of other ways you can spend your money, like paying to put books in a school, or contributing towards providing safe drinking water. Just make sure you choose carefully – not everyone will appreciate a certificate to say "Congratulations, you have built a toilet in Mauritania" as a Christmas present.
when Morven Hamilton stops playing Christmas music at full volume in our house i'll start buying green gifts. deal?
No deal.
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