The Beat the Microbead app is the fastest way to learn if your cosmetics and personal care products contain plastic ingredients. This app uses state-of-the-art text recognition technology. Just scan the ingredients of your products and check them for microplastics. Not only that, but you can also get to know microplastic-free brands certified by us.
How does it work?
It’s straightforward: you can scan products with four easy steps:
- Find the ingredients list on your product.
- Position the full list within your camera frame.
- Make sure the ingredients are clear to read.
- Take a picture to scan!
A traffic light rating system
- RED: Products that contain microplastics.
- ORANGE: Products that contain what we call “sceptical” microplastics. With this, we mean synthetic polymers for which there is not enough information available.
- GREEN: Products that do not contain microplastics.
Help us enrich our database!
Every time you add a product to our database, you help us build a case against microplastics. With every product information, we can create evidence and convince authorities about the extensive use of plastic ingredients. A bit of extra effort on your side makes you a part of the fight against microplastics in cosmetics and care products. So, go ahead, scan the barcode of your product and help us get some more information!
By adding the products to our database, you can also discover our certified microplastic-free brands. These brands have their entire range of products free of all known microplastic ingredients.
Why is it important?
Plastic in cosmetics is a global problem! Microplastics are hardly visible ingredients that pollute our planet & may pose health risks. These microplastics, hardly visible to the naked eye, flow straight from the bathroom drain into the sewer system. Microplastics are not biodegradable, and once they enter the (marine) environment, they are almost impossible to remove.
Sea animals absorb or eat microplastics; these particles are passed along the marine food chain. Since humans are ultimately at the top of this food chain, it is likely that we also ingest microplastics.
Using body washes or cosmetics that contain microplastics can put the ocean, ourselves, and our children at risk! With this app, you can get aware of this issue and make environmentally friendly choices.
Who is behind this app?
The collaborators behind this app include the following partners:
Plastic Soup Foundation: NGO based in Amsterdam, initiators of the worldwide campaign “Beat the Microbead”. Their mission: No plastic in our water or our bodies!
PINCH: a renowned mobile development agency from Amsterdam that is proud of their work for the Plastic Soup Foundation.
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User Rating
4.29 out of 5
7 ratings
in Australia
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Reviews
Incredible initiative
This is such an incredibly well thought app! Easy to use. Just simply scan products in the app and it will tell you if there are micro plastics within or not. The database of product info is massive, with heaps of brands and products from all over the world.
A lot of people are worrying about cosmetics using plastic packaging but few like us are wondering about cosmetics using plastic on the INSIDE! Sad that the world has come to this but heart warming that caring people are dedicating themselves to try and improve our world and help people be more careful about the things they consume or put on their skin. This opens doors for genuinely green-friendly brands and not just the greenwashed ones. I would love to see this initiative grow in popularity as it is so needed now more than ever!!! 💚💙
Simple & Informative
Amazingly simple to use, I love it and trying to get my friends to use it too. Disgusting finding out all my “natural” moisturisers are thickened with micro plastic dust
Great app
Fantastic app. Informative. Really easy to use and scan beauty products. Essential to have whilst shopping. You should download this, every time I scanned it told me if it had micro plastics or not.
Great
Great
Excellent concept, poor execution
In theory this app is great, however a lot of products I have scanned that do contain micro beads or other forms of plastic come up as 'unknown'. Therefore fairly useless at informing and educating people at this point.
Very disappointing app
Have scanned items multiple times and all are still "unknown". Have also tried to register 2 items and did not register but it said that it did. How can you make a safer, cleaner, healthier environment for our Earth when the app that wants to help is absolutely useless?
Microbe beads????
The registering doesn't work for any of my products, it saids add but I'm not sure if it has microbeads so how can I check??? Please fix this!
Nothing
There is hardly anything listed
All scan comes back as product unknown??
Scanned couple of products with micro beads, all returned 'product unknown'. Nice design, but useless.
Nothing registers
January 2016 and not one product in my home is on the register. How long before Australians know if we are safe?
