The blog formerly known as   Fake Plastic Fish

Category Archives: feminine hygiene and adult products

November 16, 2009

How to Survive the Green Festival

The Green Festival… this weekend was my third and probably best experience attending. I’ve read negative reviews of the Green Festival from green bloggers bemoaning that the vendor floor is so consumption-oriented and there is still so much plastic packaging and plastic products. Those comments may be valid. But you know what? The experience of The Green Festival is what you make of it. Here are some tips:

1) Meet up with your friends — the folks who create the products that you do love. I hung out with Jay from Life Without Plastic, the company that sells the airtight stainless containers I reviewed a year ago, on Friday afternoon and toured the vendor floor with him for a bit. He had just spent the previous days at the Green Business Conference and his enthusiasm was contagious.

2) Be a little outrageous. It’s the Green Festival. It’s your chance to sparkle. Walking past the ChicoBag table with Jay, I spotted a huge … Read the rest

February 13, 2008

Plastic-free sex, part 2 – Pedro offers you his protection

Couldn’t resist the above. In our house, we quote Napoleon Dynamite whenever possible. Clearly, this post has nothing to do with Pedro, but everything to do with protected sex. And despite the fun title, this post is going to be more serious than yesterday’s, so once again, consider yourself warned.

Looking over yesterday’s post on using olive oil for lube, I realized it was written from a totally married hetero-centric point of view. Which makes sense, considering this is the blog of a married woman in a monogamous het relationship. I don’t worry about whether or not using olive oil will break a condom because, like my kitties, I’ve been fixed. But you can believe that if I were the parent of a sexually active teenager, I’d be harping on them night and day to use a condom every single time and would make sure they had access to as much water-based condom-friendly lube as they wanted. (Oh, what an annoying, creepy… Read the rest

February 11, 2008

Plastic-free Sex, Part 1 – Reducing Friction in Relationships

Happy Valentine’s Day week. We’re all adults here, right? If Burbanmom can make the astonishing admission that she and her husband like to do it (gasp!) then I’m prepared to grab that ball (NPI) and run with it. Warning: this post gets a wee bit explicit. Read at your own risk.

So I’m sitting here looking at a #3 (PVC) plastic bottle of Liquid Silk sensual lubricant. The long list of chemical ingredients includes many parabens: methyl paraben, butyl paraben, ethyl paraben, propyl paraben, as well as the preservative BHT. And this is what Michael and I are putting on and in our bodies each time we get extra specially close. The Skin Deep database gives it a provisional moderate hazard rating of 4, which is not what I’m looking for when I get in bed with my guy.

Now, I know there are natural, non-toxic water-based lubricants on the market: Firefly (formerly Nude), Good Glide, O’My Natural Lubricant, Love Lube, Sensua… Read the rest

December 14, 2007

Plastic-free Feminine Hygiene. It had to happen enventually.

Since I had my hysterectomy in June, (Wow! She just jumps right in with the personal stuff, huh?) I have been relieved not to have to deal too much with the issue of plastic-free feminine hygiene products. At the time I started blogging, Crunchy Chicken was running her Diva Cup Challenge and I was happy not to have to consider whether or not to participate.

The Diva Cup, for those who still have not heard about it, is a silicone contraption, kinda like a diaphragm I guess, that you wear inside once a month, rinse out, and reuse. The environmentally-friendly thing about it is that you don’t have any tampon or pad waste each month. But what is silicone?

The Essential Chemistry website says that silicones are “synthetic polymers with a silicon-oxygen backbone similar to that in silicon dioxide (silica), but with organic groups attached to the silicon atoms by C-Si bonds.” It’s the silicon-oxygen backbone that makes it more stable… Read the rest