Vegan Beauty - What does it mean?
In the industry of beauty, it seems everyone is claiming veganism! What does vegan beauty really mean any way?
Let's start with Animal Ingredients
So you might ask, what are the animal ingredients found in your makeup, body creams, bathing soaps n foams, hair shampoos + conditioners?
It means, basically, any ingredient in THAT which had direct or indirect sourcing OR processing from an animal. Animal ingredients used for skin-beauty products can be obtained from either living or dead-killed animals. Some ingredients or the processing OF, comes from the “leftovers” of slaughtered animals. An example of this is cattle bones that are used to process white bleached sugars.
Animal ingredients can be obtained from living animals / insects like beeswax, honey, shellac, and lanolin. The makers / manufacturers may claim this as a “natural” process and that it “doesn’t hurt the animals”– however Vegan cosmetics avoid all these types of animal ingredients or processing of an item WITH animal by products.
An example is white sugar. White sugar comes from tan / beige sugar cane. It is heavily processed and bleached to obtain that "whiteness". This is found all over the restaurant industry, groceries, and the beauty industry. Sugar is used in skin care products like face-body-foot scrubs, masks, lotions, soap.
For several decades, I have avoided white sugar in public, WHERE I CAN for myself and my family, and always in my own home as well as my business.
I make my sugar lip scrubs, body scrubs etc with Turbinado Sugar. It is a tan color sugar, and I am just fine with that! I do not want my sugar processed over cattle bones, thank you! You will be sad to know that most lip and body scrubs with sugar, use pure white bleached "cattle bone" sugar.
Vegan Beauty simply means that no animal or insect was used IN ANY WAY to make or process the ingredients in that product. Now here is where I take issue with Vegan ONLY Beauty. There tends to be toxins, dyes and JUNK in many Vegan beauty products. Just because it is Vegan, does not mean that it is safe, or natural.
Hard to believe, right? Well, it is true. As a consumer who wants the safest and best food/beauty/pet products, we HAVE to look for all of these claims or label statements. *All Natural - Organic (or mostly organic) - Non GMO - Vegan - Dye and Fragrance Free - Toxin Free - Paraben Free - SLS Free- Propyl Paraben Free ... Propylene Glycol Free,,,,and..I could go on for a while, sadly.
Look at the product you are buying CLOSELY...does it say organic? Ok, well then the first 3 - 4 ingredients will be ORGANIC. If you don't see the word Organic in the first ingredients? put it back, they are playing games with you! They are hiding under the rules and procedures whereby if ANY ingredient in the product is organic, THEY GET TO STATE IT ON THE FRONT OF THE PACKAGE! I don't feel good about that, do you?
If I list a product as organic , I will show you in the ingredients, and you will easily and clearly be able to figure it out.