Cruelty-free make-up and skincare
Cruelty-free is complicated. You might be overwhelmed with animal testing laws, what they mean when they say the brand is owned by a company like L’Oreal, and if cruelty-free is vegan too. I’m here to walk you through this and out of your understandable confusion as well as list some of the brands that fall under each category. The best part? All of these can be bought in-store in our very own Bahrain.
Animal testing laws
The bottom line here is that if you’re looking for a cruelty-free brand, make sure they don’t sell in China. If a brand wants to sell in China, they’re required by law to test their products on animals. You can tell that a brand sells there when they claim to be cruelty-free ‘’except when required by law’’. While this isn’t their choice, a lot of companies choose not to sell there for this very reason. So, for a brand to sell their products in China, they are consciously deciding to test their products on animals.
Non-cruelty-free parent companies
There’s a bit of a grey area when it comes to cruelty-free brands that are owned by a company that does test on animals. By buying their products, you’re sending a message to the parent company by choosing the cruelty-free option, but profits do ultimately go to the parent company. So, it’s really up to you to choose what you believe in and are comfortable with. Brands that fall under this category are: Too Faced, Urban Decay, and Smashbox Cosmetics; all of which are also vegan-friendly.
Vegan-friendly and cruelty-free
That brings us onto our last point: cruelty-free isn’t necessarily vegan, but it can be. While it’s great to be cruelty-free, you might want to take the next step by choosing vegan-friendly products. These are cruelty-free but also free of any animal-derived ingredients. You’d need to look out for beeswax, carmine, collagen, keratin and lanolin. Or just refer to this short list of a few vegan-friendly brands: Anastasia Beverly Hills, Fenty Beauty and Marc Jacobs Beauty.
While all of these brands are great, Kat Von D and Cover FX are two 100-per-cent vegan and certified cruelty-free make-up brands that truly have the moral high ground. And if this isn’t enough and you want information on different brands, you’ll probably find this website very useful: https://choosecrueltyfree.org.au/. Now you have all the know-how for making your cruelty-free mark on the world, so go out and buy kind!
