In honor of plastic free July I stepped out of my comfort zone and pursued a DIY solution to part of my daily skin care routine – eye cream! I absolutely love eye cream. I’m not sure if it’s actually helping me avoid wrinkles, but I find the ritual of applying eye cream to be incredibly soothing. So much so that I evolved to putting it on twice a day!

In early July I realized that my tried and true eye cream, that comes in a little plastic jar, was beginning to run low. This was a perfect target for our 2×12 Reduction Challenge. It was time to find a plastic-free alternative!

Plastic Free Eye Cream

After a fair bit of google searching I was unable to find an eye cream that came in a glass or metal container and also had ingredients that I trusted. I had to turn to DIY! Luckily Wellness Mama has a recipe for moisturizing shea butter eye cream. I called up my own Mama (the original eye cream addict… hmmm, wonder where I got it??) and asked her if she’d like to experiment with DIY eye cream. She was in!

We were able to find the ingredients pretty easily:

• Shea Butter – I purchased ours at Sprouts. It did unfortunately come in a plastic tub, but I will be able to recycle it and it will enable us to make years worth of eye cream! This is an example of how buying in bulk packaging is a better step, not perfect, but better.
• Coconut Oil – We already had coconut oil on hand. We usually purchase it in a glass jar at Trader Joe’s.
• Beeswax – My Mom had recently purchased local beeswax at a farmer’s market.
• Rosehip Oil – Once again, Sprouts for the win!
• Geranium Essential Oil – Yep, you guessed it. I got ours at Sprouts.

You can read about how to make this eye cream on Wellness Mama, but I will say that it was super easy! You basically just gently heat it all up. Easy peasy, no special equipment required, and not very messy. This is my kind of DIY! Oh, one note though, we find the scent of geranium EO to be a bit overwhelming, so we went pretty light on it. I read in the comments that you could use lavender instead. Might try that next time!

My New Eye Cream Routine

I’m really enjoying my shea butter eye cream. It truly is intensely moisturizing! So moisturizing in fact that I can only use it at night. Since it’s largely oil based it does make my skin appear oily. Fine for night time, but not for daytime. This hasn’t been a full plastic elimination for me, but it has been a significant reduction. I am now able to use this eye cream at night and just a small dab of my bareMinerals eye cream in the morning. Even though bareMinerals isn’t plastic free, I really like their focus on safe, healthy ingredients and not testing on animals. I just wish they offered plastic-free options, which is why I’m happy that I will only need to buy it once a year now instead of 2-3 times. Baby steps in the right direction!

Have you found any solutions to plastic free, natural eye cream? If so, please share!

xo, Nicole