You care what you put on and in your body. We do too.
Our Journey
Our journey began in 2012 when the doctor said, “It’s a tumor.”
Earlier that day, Michael had an ultrasound done to scan a lump that he’d found.
When the family doctor called to share the findings, he was professional about it, but not cold. The fact was, Michael had cancer.
Although cancer is something common here in the US, when it strikes a family member, or you personally, it hits hard. It seems like a disease that happens to everybody else.
But we realized right then: we’d entered a new chapter in our lives whether we were ready or not.
Fortunately, a straightforward surgery was all that was needed. No radiation, no chemotherapy.
Unfortunately, the mental strain of waiting on tests and results was pretty big.
Even though things did in fact turn out fine, we knew that for millions of other people that wasn’t the case. We also knew that we didn’t want to just put this behind us and forget the lesson.
Cancer doesn’t just happen randomly. There’s always a cause. Not only did we revisit our nutritional habits, but we also investigated our product usage habits. And what we found was kind of scary.
Many products we use every day have known carcinogens in them.
You may have heard in early December 2021 about a bunch of deodorant lines being pulled off the market due to having high amounts of benzene in them.
That’s not new. And that’s just one example.
So we set out to start reverse engineering ALL the products we use in our own household. We started with deodorant, and then worked our way through all of our personal and household care products one at a time.
As we developed products we asked our friends and family to test them for us. The response was usually, “You should sell this!”
In 2021 we did just that. We started an Etsy shop with just a few varieties of bar soaps and lip balms and grew from there. We now have our own website and are occasionally vendors at events. You can find us at exactlyzero.com