When people ask me how to clean up their beauty and personal care routines, conventional perfume is one of the first items I recommend ditching. Not everyone wears perfume daily, but I wouldn’t even risk wearing it occasionally. Thanks to trade secret laws that protect perfume companies from disclosing their secret ingredients, there is no transparency about what is actually in the bottle. That’s right, perfume companies are not required to list the ingredients on the label. Yet, we know from independent laboratory testing that much of what is in perfume is bad, very bad.

Let’s back up for a second, because I want to talk about how smart our bodies are intuitively. Before I ever learned about the dangers lurking in your average perfume bottle, I struggled to find a perfume I could actually wear without developing headaches and nausea. I would find something I thought I could enjoy only to have the smell grow increasingly bad to my nose and trigger the physical reactions. I’ve also fallen victim to other people’s perfume more often than I care to recount. Sitting on a flight next to a heavily perfumed woman, or being hugged and having someone’s perfume latch on to my clothes. It’s all very unpleasant, and I imagine many of you have had a similar experience. I now understand that those feelings of physical illness were my body’s way of rejecting something that is essentially poison.

Here’s the deal — because fragrance is a trade secret, companies are allowed to list “fragrance” on ingredient labels without disclosing what “fragrance” is made of. The reality is that fragrance is composed of hundreds of synthetic chemicals, and many are known hormone disrupters and have been linked to cancer, reproductive toxicity and more. Phthalates are one of the most common offenders. These hidden chemicals commonly cause allergic reactions and trigger asthma, migraines and other sensitivities, too. They irritate the skin and the respiratory system. In short, ditching conventional perfume is one of the best things you can do for your health.

What’s a woman to do without perfume? Not to worry. There are botanical perfumes that are safe to use because they are made from pure botanical materials like essential oils, absolutes and balsams rather than petrochemicals and other synthetics. When I discovered natural perfume, I learned that an entire world of gorgeous fragrance was available to me without the usual suffering that accompanied the toxic perfumes of my past. Natural perfumes are more sophisticated, delicate and unique than conventional perfumes, too. That’s because they aren’t developed from stock, generic formulas. They are blended from ingredients with a vibrant energy and life force of their own. Integrity Botanicals carries two of my favorite natural perfume lines, Strange Invisible and Lurk. Trial sizes are available for both lines, and today there’s a flash sale!

Use the code: BEMINE to receive 14% off the entire Valentine’s Day Collection today only. The promotion ends tonight at 11:59pm PST, 2/14. Happy Valentine’s Day!