Checking the ingredients label on my lip balm wasn’t exactly top of my list when I first turned vegan a few years ago. To be honest, I was more focused on curbing my intense cravings for cheese and finding a nut milk that wouldn’t curdle in my tea. But it didn’t take long for things to change. Inevitably, the more I started paying attention to what was in my food, the more I found myself questioning what I was putting on my skin.
Fast-forward to today and veganism has well and truly made its mark on the mainstream. An increasing number of us are looking for ways to eat and shop as ethically as possible, and the latest hot topic is make-up. You only have to look at the high street to see how vegan makeup is starting to break through. Just last year, Superdrug opened a pop-up store dedicated to vegan products and reported a 60% increase in sales of their vegan range.
But with so much talk about ‘vegan’ and ‘crueltyfree’ products, the truth is it can sometimes be hard to navigate this constantly-changing industry. For example, did you know make-up labelled ‘crueltyfree’ isn’t always ‘vegan’? And vice-versa? Products labelled as vegan contain no animal products, while a cruelty-free label simply implies the product hasn’t been tested on animals. To make matters even more confusing, lots of mainstream brands don’t always make it obvious which of their products are vegan and cruelty-free, meaning consumers like myself have to spend hours researching which products we can use.