Next time you compile your shopping list, scribble FAIR at the top to remind yourself to participate in The BIG Swap! We all mean well, but good intentions often go to the wayside as we forget to remind ourselves. To help, we've put together seven items you'll enjoy swapping to a Fairtrade item!

1. Flowers

Several online destinations offer the Fairtrade alternative, but it's great to see a High Street retailer, Marks & Spencer offer a comprehensive range of Fairtrade Flowers, both in their stores and online. Giving a fair bunch to a friend not only signals your love, flowers with the Fairtrade mark will send an extra special message as well. While we adore our fairly traded felt flowers from Henry & Jayne (they last a lifetime and never need watering), the fragrance of freshly cut flowers from a fair trade source is a colourful way to make The BIG Swap too!

2. Clothes

Ever since we met Safia Minney, the Fairtrade pioneer at People Tree, we've been hellbent on helping her raise awareness of the desperate need for Fair Trade. Try to resist the temptation to shop fast and cheap, and invest in a wardrobe that's stylish and fair. SustainyourStyle.com, the global eco fashion guide, is the best place to source Fairtrade Luxury Designers,  Everyday Wear that's been fairly traded, even Fairtrade lingerie, Jewellery, Bags and Menswear.

3. Beauty

According to the Fairtrade Foundation, in Europe "at least 5 billion beauty products are sold each year using around 1.5 million tonnes of ingredients." Buying Fairtrade Beauty products is a beautiful thing to do as it helps third world producers (more than) meet the costs of ingredient production - think shea nut butter, cocoa butter, olive oil, honey - which often fails to happen with mainstream beauty products. Ready for the big swap? Look out for the FAIRTRADE mark: We recommend Neils Yard Remedies and Akoma Skincare as good starting points for your fair beauty boost!

4. Olive Oil

The GIN Lady uses gallons of the stuff and no doubt you do if you love to cook (it makes a good massage oil base too!). More often than not, we buy the organic variety, but thanks to Equal Exchange, we can also have our cake and eat it, as they retail a range of Oils (olive and brazil nut) that are both FAIRTRADE as well as organic! Palestine is a messy political hot potato, and their producers need as much help as they can get. Trade is a sustainable way to strengthen a community, but only if it's done fairly. 

Equal Exchange's Organic Fairtrade Palestinian Extra Virgin Olive Oil is a blend of olive oils from family owned olive groves around the Jenin area of the West Bank.

Olives are picked fresh by hand and produce a delicious high quality olive oil. Next time you shudder when you hear of the struggle of Palestinians under strict Israeli occupation, put this Fairtrade Olive Oil on your shopping list. You'll be making more of a difference than you realise.

5. Peanuts

We're nutty over the idea of Fairtrade peanuts, and The Co-operative was the first supermarket to introduce certified FAIRTRADE salted peanuts. The peanuts are grown in a place close to The GIN Lady's heart - Malawi. Despite marked poverty, the Malawi people are the happiest people we have ever met! But that's no reason not to give them another reason to be happy - we need to help lift them out of poverty too :-) Click this link to hear from the producers' directly.

6. Beer

Your peanuts will taste even better if slipped down with a glass of Fairtrade beer. Either opt for the fruity Mongozo fairtrade beers or pick up some Fairtrade Bumble Bee Honey Ale next time you're shopping at The Co-operative.

7. Wine

Unless you abstain, many of us reach for a bottle in the supermarket that sounds delicious, is priced well and will match your dinner. All too often, The GIN Lady doesn't make a conscientious decision to only buy Fair Trade wine. Not any more! Read our Fair Trade wine feature to shatter your perceptions once and for all. FT wines are surprisingly good, often command a fair price too, and will make you feel better for making The BIG Swap!

COMMIT TO THE BIG SWAP

Now that you've decided to swap one or more items, why not help The BIG Swap. At the time of writing, there are 735,365 swaps to go before they reach their 1 million target. Every swap counts. All you have to do is go to The BIG Swap website, register (name and email, that's it), choose your swaps (the fun bit!), your location, and submit. Easy and fun! You can also spread the news via your facebook page, twitter account, and get a badge like ours (above right) to put on your blog...

There was a time when Fairtrade conjured up images of smiling people in far-off, agriculturally dependant countries, tilling the soil. It was all about what we put inside us - chocolate, coffee, rice and bananas, all the stuff The GIN Lady has already mentioned. Now Fairtrade is about pretty much everything we consume. And the most hotly contested area is probably Fairtrade fashion. It's the new frontier in the fight for doing the right thing while also consuming as we wish.

The issue is tres chaud... not because of Fairtrade but because it's fashion. Better ethics in what we eat is easier to digest (pun intended!) but better ethics and values in fashion... well, that's suspect because fashion is in itself isn't very 'deep', is it? Surely a fashionista can't comprehend more than colour and trend and even if she could, she would only care about 'the cost' in terms of what her credit card statement said, right? Wrong I think - values are important to most of us, fashionable as can be, both for what goes inside and what goes on the outside.

Anyway so what's the low-down and down-low on Fairtrade fashion? Well, in a nutshell, fashion typically has cared only about the end product - the garment that promises to make us feel better once donned. How equitably and humanely it actually got to us hasn't been something high on the commercial agenda of fashion.

Fairtrade fashion, on the other hand, is about creating a fair garment from start to finish and goes far beyond the 'benefit' of the purchasing party preening in her new acquisition. The Fairtrade fashion process involves, in different measure, opportunities for smaller, marginalized producers, development of producers' independence and access to markets, transparency and accountability in the manufacturing and trade practices, a fair price mutually agreed with local communities, gender parity, ensuring no child labour that harms the children's well being, chances in life and sustainable, locally and environmentally sound production practices are adhered to.

Fairtrade fashion clearly has a lot more benefits than the usual 'retail therapy' we get.

More simply, Fairtrade fashion or fashion that's traded fairly (which is a lighter shade of full on certified Fairtrade) does what it says - it ensures things are fair from field to boutique shelf. Non-fairtrade, on the other hand, is a pretty direct, to the point, no bulls**t kinda scenario too: Buy cheap fast fashion (the worst offender against Fairtrade principles) and know that people (somewhere in a land far far away) will be unhealthy, forfeit an education, remain mired in poverty and lose their lives prematurely.

Think about it, the fairtrade choice is simple. Let's make it fashionable!

Why isn't there a Chocoholics Anonymous? Because no-one wants to quit! Knock knock. Who's there? Imogen. Imogen who? Imogen life without chocolate! Most of us can't imagine life without tucking into a bar of chocolate. It's addictive, and while not nearly as much as coffee, why do we love it so? Scientists tell us it's down to the phenylephylamine, the same hormone the brain triggers when you fall in love. And we've been in love with chocolate for a while. The first chocolate house opened in London in 1657 serving it up as a drink, and cost 10-15 shillings per pound. Chocolate is no longer taken just as a beverage or luckily restricted to the elite. And that's because it's relatively cheap, and that may indeed uncover why so much of it is unfair.

According to The Fairtrade Foundation, "... the fluctuation of the world market price poses real obstacles to earning a decent livelihood for the millions of farmers working to cultivate cocoa on small family farms in equatorial regions. Many who live in villages lack access to clean water and health care and struggle to support their families." So a fair price for a fair trade makes all the difference. And yes we're definitely tucking into it, as currently 21% of cocoa and 18% of dark chocolate sold by the major multiples is now Fairtrade. Just imagine the difference it could make if it was 100% Fairtrade. Knock knock. Who's there? Imogen. Imogen who? Imogen a fair life in the developing world. Go on, make a difference. Say no to that Mars Bar until it's labelled with Fairtrade.

Rice is guzzled the world over, and grown on every continent except for Antartica. 96% of rice is eaten where it's grown. So far so good, as locally sourced foods is a good thing. But there's a problem. We don't have rice paddies at home, so we have to import it. The problem is not all of it is fairly traded. That's a shame, as we eat a lot of the stuff. On average, each of us in the UK eats 4.4 kg a year. While we're counting, did you know there are roughly 29,000 grains to a pound of long grain rice? We're wondering how long it took to count them! Continuing this count theme, the Finnish count the number of grains in a brides hair to work out how many kids the couple will have (we've now replaced rice for confetti and as far as we know, there is no precise scientific method to actually predict family size!). You may be wondering why we throw it around at weddings in the first place? It's because rice is a symbol of fertility and life. Rice is certainly interesting! Well the Chinese certainly think so. They eat so much of it, the word rice also means food in Chinese. And rice has a lot of 'siblings' ... there's 40,000 varieties, although only 100 or so of them are actually marketed.

Of the rice being marketed to us Brits, the first fairtrade rice hit our shelves in 2005. Good thing, because it's backbreaking work, and small scale rice farmers often face unsurmountable problems, as the US and EU heavily subsidise their own rice farmers, making it nearly impossible to compete in the developing world. That's why buying fairtrade rice makes all the difference. Let's make it happen, and only buy fairtrade rice from now on.

Around 1.4 billion cups of coffee are drunk around the world every day. How many have you guzzled down  today? Without a doubt, coffee is our favourite bevvie to get us buzzing in the morning. Such a buzz it's even prohibited by the International Olympic Committee. Too much of the stuff, and you're out! It's the stuff of revolutions too. Both the American and French Revolutions were born in coffee houses, don't you know! Taking this in? Probably not. Your body gets rid of 20% of it from your system every hour. Coffee can arouse an angry reaction too. When the bean (a berry actually) was introduced in England, ale and wine merchants were so hopping mad with jealousy, they launched a campaign to persuade Charles II to issue an order to suppress coffeehouses. There was such a public outcry the order was retracted on January 8, 1675. They weren't the only ones to get angry. In London, a group of women formed the Women's Petition Against Coffee (WPAC) in 1674. They complained their men were always at the coffee houses instead of helping them at home (go girls!). But there's another reason to be agitated about coffee nowadays. What comes to mind when I say "sweatshops in the fields"? Poverty and debt. That's because many small coffee producers are getting paid less than their production costs. World prices, ruthless multinationals and local governments are largely to blame. So let's start a revolution of our own, and only buy fairtrade coffee. That'll be a buzz, don't you think...?!