Project Green Search Kicks Off!

Last Friday the Greenloop, Lü magazine and a host of other great sponsors and media partners quietly kicked off Project Green Search, our first national green model search with finals held on the runway during Portland Fashion Week October 11th.

The green bloggosphere is starting to pick up on it, so hopefully our contest will come to the attention of models everywhere who aspire to shift their career in the same direction they have taken their personal lives.

We’ve been written up on Eco-Chick, the Daily Green, Mother Nature Network, Elephant Journal, Ecorazzi, Kaight, Greenopia, GreenGirlsGlobal, LiveEarth, Sustainablog, Inhabitat, Magnifeco, Christy Coleman and Treehugger. Friends of Lü and the Greenloop are telling all their friends on facebook, Model Mayhem, MySpace and other networks.  

We have on board with us some terrific people. Photographer Courtney Dailey, who helped launch CocoEco magazine with publisher Anna Griffin and Emma Pezzack of Future Natural, is building an all green photography studio in downtown LA’s fashion district. She will be on hand with her green make-up and styling team to photograph all the contestants.

In her upcoming book Chasing Molecules on Island Press, Portland resident and author Elizabeth Grossman writes:

“Cosmetics and electronics – may seem poles apart, but they have some surprising similarities – as illustrated by the work of Amy Cannon, an energetic researcher with the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry and cofounder and executive director of its associated educational non-profit, the BeyondBenign Foundation. Cannon’s work focuses on electronics, specifically formulating environmentally benign chemicals for use in semi-conductor and solar-cell production. Development of “green” chemicals for cosmetics, however, has emerged as a sideline thanks to the curious gallery of overlapping polymer applications – and the musings of inquisitive graduate students.”

One of our judges, Josie Maran, is perpetually developing better green chemistry for her cosmetic line. The realization that what goes on your skin, goes into your body, is reinventing the chemistry of all beauty products. We can no longer ignore that spraying your hair for decades with dangerous polymers breathing all that synthetic glue didn’t have anything to do with the dramatic rise of cancer rates in our modern society.

This is the work our media sponsor Teens Turning Green has been doing with the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, educating young people about the chemical soup they subject themselves to if they are not careful in how they pick the companies they spend their money on.

A model or actress, living and advocating the green lifestyle, can no longer lend her image to advertising cosmetic companies which have not committed to a deep study of all chemicals used in their formulation. By doing so, they are giving birth to new industries down the line of manufacture, which will put a stop to the destruction of our air and water.

All these topics are intertwined in a mesh of responsibilities. To quote animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot in a recent interview for the French magazine Philosophie: “Beauty will save the world!”