Every Monday, our resident gurus identify groundbreaking, trendy, hip products that elevate your life from bourgeois to brilliant.

Humidifiers and air purifiers have a lot of benefits. For example, they can help keep your skin from drying out in the winter, and may even reduce the symptoms of your nasty cold. But there’s usually one big problem: these contraptions are often quite fugly.

Thankfully, designers at Cloud and Co. created a sleek, ultra-modern humidifier. Its matte, white shell is pure beauty, even when the device isn’t running. The designers summarize it as thus: “Functional product and art object.”

When you can leave your humidifier out in public next to your Modernica V-leg series table, yes, yes please.

Discover more at Cloud and Co.

Photo credit: Stop the Water While Using Me!

Every Monday, our resident gurus identify groundbreaking, trendy, hip products that elevate your life from bourgeois to brilliant.

According to the United States’ Natural Resources Defense Council, more than 30 percent of counties in the lower 48 states will face extremely serious water shortages within the next 40 years. There are a lot of things you can do to conserve water (and also reduce your utility bills). For example, cutting your showering time back by just 60 seconds can save you just under 2,000 gallons of water annually. Hot damn.

But sometimes, it can just be so hard to remember to turn off the water when shampooing or scrubbing down your bod. Thankfully, we now have Stop the Water While Using Me!, marketed as the world’s first cosmetics line built around reminding you to turn off the water (also, arguably one of the longest brand names ever chosen for a cosmetics line).

It’s a full range of bath products for your skin and scalp, including shampoo, soap, shower gel and body lotion, and each is made with purely natural ingredients like honey and grapefruit. Other perks include a complete absence of chemicals and synthetic dyes and perfumes. Plus, none of its products were tested on bunnies, hamsters, ogopogos or anything else with a mother and father.

Oh yeah, and its all-caps label reminds you to shut off the water when you’re washing. If only for 60 seconds. It’s not that hard, right? Discover more at STWWUM’s website, which has an equally long URL address.

Source: TranquilTuesdays.com

Every Monday, our resident gurus identify groundbreaking, trendy, hip products that elevate your life from bourgeois to brilliant.

Tranquil Tuesdays, a Beijing-based tea company, is shaking up the sleepy tea world with its non-tranquil approach to commerce. Each of its six tea varieties — white tea, black tea, green tea, Pu’Er tea and two kinds of oolong tea — are handpicked at tiny family-run tea estates throughout China.

In China, women generally pick the tea while men control the business side of things, but Tranquil Tuesdays works directly with many female supplies and is commited to improving the skills of underprivileged women in China’s rural communities.

But for many people, it all comes down to the flavor. Tranquil Tuesday’s teas are unblended, unflavored and unscented, so what you’re tasting is the distinct flavor of an individual estate in a specific region.

Discover more at TranquilTuesdays.com.

Smart phones are more common than Justin Bieber songs on the radio, and the iPhone is one of the most popular phones of them all. If you’ve got one of Steve Job’s babies in your pocket, take advantage of its mobile power with our four favorite health-friendly iPhone apps (which also work on the iPad).

HappyCow Restaurant Finder ($2.99 USD)

Your coworker is like, “Hey, wanna grab lunch?” And all of a sudden you’re scouring Yelp to find a place nearby that’s good. But if you’re like me, you then look up the restaurant’s menu to figure out if there is anything there that you can actually eat with a good conscious. Health-conscious restaurant lovers, rejoice! HappyCow’s mobile app lets you see all the nearby restaurants, and lets you filter them by health categories such as vegetarian or vegan.

Roaming Hunger (Free)

Food trucks are all the rage. But they are also impossibly hard to find when you’re hungry, and no one is especially nostalgic for the hunter-and-gatherer age. This iPhone app tracks more than 800 food trucks across the United States and tells you exactly where the truck is located at that moment. Even better, it also gives you menu details and sorting options, like searching for nearby vegetarian-friendly food trucks.

Go Vegan! ($6.99)

By now, most people have read or heard of Sarah Kramer’s How It All Vegan cookbook. This app is a condensed version; a mobile cookbook with recipes for everything from breakfast to dessert, plus video cooking tips. A bit pricey, apps-wise, but much cheaper than buying an actual cookbook. And now no one will look at you awkward when you try stuffing the full-sized cookbook in your pocket. Are you just happy to see me?

BnB ($2.99)

Be nice to bunnies! And other animals, too, with this app that helps you identify whether a product contains animal-based ingredients or has been tested on animals. You can search for specific product names or sort by company or product category, and it includes all common items like laundry detergent and shampoo.

Chapstick’s “Classic” formula has more than a dozen ingredients, including unpronouncables like “arachidyl propionate” and Iron Man-worthy dye names like “FD&C yellow no. 5 aluminum lake.”

Compare that to the lip balm from Sprout Skincare, which contains just four ingredients: cocoa butter, extra-virgin olive oil, beesewax and essential oils. Plus, it’s organic, fair trade and handmade in Hipsterland Brooklyn!

Even more, we love that it’s made by a tiny business headed up by Brooklyn entrepreneur Adina Grigore. “Our ingredients are safe enough to eat!” she tells Entrepreneur magazine.

Unfortunately, the lip balm doesn’t give any specific calorie information.

Because bar soap is more ubiquitous in your bathroom than a Kardashian on cable TV, it’s so very easy to take it for granted. But you probably shouldn’t. Most of the bar soap products on store shelves are pumped full of dyes, chemicals, artificial perfumes and other nasty stuff that, over time, can dry out and damage your skin. Hello, premature wrinkles!

While Dr. Bronner’s magic soap bars — no, really, they’re labeled “magic” — may first catch your eyes for their text-heavy, messy labeling, a second glance reveals just how awesome these soap bars are. The ingredient list boasts all-natural, organic and fair trade stuff like coconut oil and jojoba oil, while it also proudly displays PETA’s “Not Animal Tested” logo. Good for my skin, good for the bunny rabbits, good enough for me!

Plus, the numerous available scents, like citrus orange and lavender, are as refreshingly clean as the ingredients. Cruelty-free soap has never smelled or felt so good!