Leslie ReichertThe Cleaning Coach

I'm very excited to introduce you to Ava and her business; Ava Anderson Non-Toxic. Ava is a young woman that is changing the way cosmetic business works in the US. Her business has just been nominated as an Emerging Entrepreneur of 2011 by Entrepreneur Magazine! You can go to this link and vote for her company. She was recently highlighted in an article by Eco RI News. Below is the article. Watch a young woman make a difference!

Skin-Product Company Thrives Under Teen CEO
By TIM FAULKNER/ecoRI News staff

Barrington resident Ava Anderson was one of this year's Clean Water Action/Ocean State Action environmental achievement award winners. (Tim Faulkner/ecoRI news)WARREN — Read the back of the label, not the front. It's a practice most health-concious consumers follow while shopping for food, but not always when buying toothpaste, deodorant and sunscreen.

Ava Anderson Non-Toxic, a skin-care company based locally, is helping broaden the public's label-inspection habits with a simple premise: What goes on your body is just as important as what goes in it.

Trouble is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) doesn't have jurisdiction over personal-care products like it does with food. So companies don't always list every ingredient on their moisturizer or shampoo. In fact, there are some 600 chemicals that qualify as a "proprietary" fragrance or parfum that don't need to be disclosed.

So in 2009, at just 15, Ava Anderson, a Barrington resident and high school student at Moses Brown in Providence, started a for-profit business to educate consumers about the pervasive and harmful chemicals in everyday products — chemicals that if not absorbed by the body eventually wash down the drain and work their way into the environment, drinking water and food supply.

Following in the footsteps of her grandfather Charles Collis, former owner of Princess House, a successful giftware company in Taunton, Mass., Ava adapted the direct sales, party-plan approach to selling personal-care products. The person-to-person model helps deliver an alternative perspective to the feel-good branding from companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Clorox and even Tom's of Maine, companies that sell "trusted" products with unsafe and unhealthy ingredients consumers have dabbed and lathered on their skin for decades. Read more here