Our New Favorite Eco-Friendly Products

The historic Town Tire Co. building, now home to Rolling Greens Hollywood, was originally designed as an open-air market.

The second-anniversary party for the green lifestyle website EcoStiletto.com was held at the Rolling Greens Hollywood nursery, and the women in attendance were as pretty as flowers themselves, attired in brightly colored skin-skimming summer dresses. (We missed the wardrobe memo and showed up in black ourselves.) We were all toting an extra handbag to donate to the new Los Angeles branch of Dress for Success, the terrific nonprofit organization that provides interview-appropriate clothing and accessories for low-income women seeking to enter the workforce. In exchange we got a recycled bag to fill with the latest green swag.

Here’s some of what we collected:

1. Tom’s of Maine’s new Wicked Fresh mouthwash and toothpaste, which promises to “neutralize stinky volatile sulphur compounds” with a combination of licorice-root extract and aromatic oils like mint. We like the frank language and we like that the packaging is made with recycled paperboard and soy ink.

2. A Waterpik EcoFlow shower head that saves up to 1 gallon of water a minute, with five settings and a pause control to use when you’re shaving your legs or letting that deep-conditioning mask sink into your hair. How important is a water-conserving shower head? Consider that, according to the EPA, showering accounts for 17 percent of residential water consumption in the United States — more than 1.2 trillion gallons of water each year.

3. A six-piece box of Nicobella Vegan Organic Dark Chocolate Truffles, in flavors like pumpkin chai, sunflower banana butter and ginger green tea. Created by nutritionist Nichole Dandrea, the truffles include good-for-you ingredients like sunflower- and pumpkin-seed butter, organic oat milk and blueberry nectar. A mere 40–61 calories each, the confections are, most important, absolutely delicious.

4. Green Works bathroom cleaner. Maybe not the most glamorous product we’ve ever gotten in a gift bag, but this “99% naturally derived” cleaner from a major brand — Clorox — really does have cred. It was recently certified by the nonprofit Natural Products Association, which requires that products be made up of at least 95 percent natural ingredients from renewable or plentiful sources (with artificial ingredients allowed only when viable natural ingredients are unavailable) and packaging must contain a majority of biodegradable and post-consumer recycled content.

5. Jane Iredale’s creamy blush stick in Chemistry. A beautiful long-lasting rosy brown, the blush is made with cocoa powder, so it gives off an unmistakable whiff of chocolate and makes you feel like a 4-year-old with the remnants of a chocolate-chip cookie all over her cheeks.

What we didn’t leave with, but we’re hoping to win when the results of a raffle are revealed in October, is the $4,000 Sustainable Edge Bed from Environment Furniture. Made of gorgeous reclaimed Brazilian peroba rosa wood, the bed floats on a wide platform that includes end tables and four sliding drawers. We’ve been dreaming of the bed while eating those luscious vegan truffles, but since we’re in a planet-friendly, love-thy-reader kind of mood, we’re sharing the information here on how to enter the EcoStiletto sweepstakes yourself.

What’s your favorite green find?

Photo credit: Amy Graves for EcoStiletto.com