July’s Awesome grant goes to Love the Label, a student-led campaign based at Nipissing University in North Bay, ON, promoting a greater awareness of the ingredients found in cosmetics and other personal care products.

In September 2010, the team launched the Love the Label campaign on the Nipissing U campus. Funded from their own pockets, they set up a booth at the school with a wicked-awesome display to help educate their classmates and community about the harmful toxins found in every day cosmetics and personal care products. The responses were thrilling and lead the team to start doing presentations in classes at school and at Youth Centres out in the community. In January 2011, they launched lovethelabel.ca with a simple message: read your ingredients’ labels and love them! Only then can you be sure that what you are using is safe.

“Unfortunately Canada and the USA have very loose chemical laws, which allow the cosmetics industry to ‘test’ their own products and then sell them. You can imagine how non-awesome that truly is. There is not enough money to test each product individually, so every year our markets are flooded with new products that for the most part are widely unregulated. Love the Label cannot stand for this. We demand safer products, we demand stronger laws, and throughout it all we help to motivate the average consumer to read, research, and review what they are spending their money on!” –Marina DeMarco, Love the Label

Their project is fundamentally grassroots, with their own time and money spent on developing a sustainable Love the Label program in Universities and colleges throughout Canada. With the Awesome Ottawa grant they will start rolling out their collected information in packages that can be used at any university to educate and inspire. You can follow their progess on their blog and on Twitter @Lovethelabel. Awesome job so far ladies!