Going Cruelty Free

Going cruelty-free, no matter how long you have been using makeup is doing the right thing. Animals do not need to suffer for us to feel or look beautiful and, the more access we have to information, the more people have made the change. There are no hard and fast rules about how you go cruelty-free, though. 

Bunny 

The bunny isn’t the be-all and end-all. Sadly many companies will add bunnies to their packaging, but they are the legitimate one. So pay attention to the packaging when you are making a purchase. This goes double if you like to buy new brands and dupes online. 

The real cruelty-free bunny, the leaping bunny, means they have been tested and approved by a regulating body - which has standards to be met. 

Photo by JealousWeekends on Unsplash

China

This can be tricky. Terminology matters. If you tweet a company and ask if their products are made in China, and they say ‘no,’ that doesn’t mean anything other than their warehouse is elsewhere. If you ask, the more specific ‘do you sell your products in China, do you sell X product there?’ If the answer is yes they sell there it is not going to be cruelty-free. Brands have to opt-out of selling in China to be genuinely cruelty-free. Chinese laws mean that makeup brands who sell there are required by law to test products on animals in order to trade in mainland China. 

E.U.

This doesn’t mean that you are safe just by shopping E.U. brands. There is a ban on the marketing and sales of makeup that has been tested on animals in the E.U. However, many makeup brands are international - meaning this doesn’t apply to them at all. So they are free to test on animals elsewhere and then sell anywhere they like. You can tweet the brands for more information, or do some research online to find what you need. 

Ingredients

Semantics again, but they will still make a difference if you are asking a brand directly. If you ask them, are their ‘products cruelty-free?’ They can pretty much say yes. There is no real, in stone, definitions of cruelty-free. But if you ask ‘are your ingredients tested on animals?’ that is a yes or no reply. 

Replacing

When you start making the switch, don’t rush to do it all at once. Swap out product by product to give yourself time to adjust to using new shades and formulas. When you see that you are coming to the end of say, foundation, start looking for samples from cruelty-free brands. So that when the time comes you won’t waste money buying shades that don’t match. It is essential that when you are switching to cruelty-free, that you remember that some of your current brushes are animal hair. It is probably just time to invest in a gorgeous synthetic eye brush set instead. 

Have fun! There is nothing as exciting as finding new brands to test out when you are a makeup lover, especially when it involves saving animals. 

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