There’s nothing like becoming a mum to put a dampener on your beauty routine. Out go the Brazilian waxes, spray-on tans, long soaks in the bath and afternoons at the hairdresser’s having three sets of highlights. Suddenly, just managing to shower is a minor miracle, and as for make-up and a blow-dry, they’re about as likely as a good night’s sleep. Your beauty regime is no longer about looking good; instead, like everything else in your life, it is all about the baby.

Oxytocin – the bonding hormone released when giving birth, breast-feeding and having skin-on-skin contact with your child – rewires your brain. In Discovery Channel terms, you no longer need to groom and prettify yourself to find a mate. Now your priority is caring for your cub. And those protective feelings influence even the vainest mother’s choice of toiletries.

And my, does the beauty market know about this. According to Mintel, the UK baby-and-child toiletries market is now worth a staggering £330m. An increasing number of products are aimed at pregnant women and new mums looking to change their beauty routine, and there’s a booming trend for American-style baby showers, for which beautifully packaged, spoil-baby-and-mum products are an easy choice as presents.

A word of warning, though. These new ranges may satisfy a frustrated beauty addict, but do newborns actually need such a wealth of creams? The rabid phase of prebirth acquisition that most mums experience (that blissful window of shopping opportunity between the start of maternity leave and the baby being born) has produced such delightfully novel and utterly redundant items as the Prince Lionheart Ultimate Wipes Warmer – for those for whom the thought of a cold baby wipe is too much to bear – not to mention all those dreadful towels with ears and tails that are impractically small.

Expensive massage oils for the under-2s are equally pointless, considering that most midwives recommend washing newborns in nothing more than water, and moisturising them using olive oil from the kitchen cupboard.

Most of us, however, want to use something a little more aesthetically pleasing than olive oil – and, unsurprisingly, the real growth area in the mother-and-baby beauty market is in natural and organic formulations. It makes perfect sense. Babies’ skin is thinner than that of adults, and has higher absorption rates, so new mums have reason to be concerned.

“When I was pregnant and breast-feeding, I was really careful about what I ate, but then I realised I was putting all sorts of chemicals into my body via cosmetics,” says Margo Marrone, a former pharmacist who trained in homeopathy. Disillusioned with seemingly natural products that were actually loaded with synthetic chemicals, she founded the Organic Pharmacy to offer concerned mums a label they could trust.

Patricia Wise, a breast-feeding tutor for the National Childbirth Trust, takes a similar line. “It is really important, especially if you’re breast-feeding, to use natural, unperfumed products,” she says. “A mother’s beauty regime will affect her baby.”

Scented products such as deodorant and shampoo can cause allergies, rashes and breathing difficulties – they also mask a mother’s natural scent, which can make breast-feeding hard. And that is not the worst of it. “The chemicals used to perfume products – polycyclic musks – are linked to the multiplication of breast-cancer cells,” claims Elizabeth Salter Green, managing director of ChemTrust, an organisation that highlights links between some man-made chemicals and disease.

Perfume is an obvious villain – and it is found in numerous children’s products. Many new mothers choose not to wear deodorant for this reason, but a lot of purportedly natural cosmetics contain a cocktail of chemicals such as the foaming agent sodium lauryl sulphate and parabens. Mineral oil, a cheap petroleum byproduct that prevents skin from breathing, is the main ingredient in baby oil. It’s not toxic, but everyday use of something that disrupts your skin’s natural function is hardly ideal.

So, what is a concerned mum to do? Abandoning deodorant is, fortunately, not the only option. The emergence of new brands such as the Organic Pharmacy, Erbaviva, Burt’s Bees and Arcania Apothecary means that you can easily avoid man-made chemicals. The EU’s recent Reach strategy – the most significant legislation in this field since the second world war – will also be a spur for wider change.

Of course, not everything synthetic is bad for you (nor everything natural good). But we are seeing the beginning of a revolution in cosmetics comparable to that in the food market. What you put on your body, it would seem, is becoming as important as what you put in it.

And where better to begin than with those at the start of their lives? Now, about that gym membership I have yet to use . . .

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