Today you don’t have to visit a craft fair or choose hippie-dippy products or dated colors in order to avoid animal ingredients. Dozens of beauty companies offer luxury, mid-priced, and bargain brands to appeal to vegans, people with sensitive skin, or people who prefer natural or chemical-free beauty.
These companies have a head start in the new animal-aware landscape, both ethically and business-wise. Arbonne, Pacifica, and Beauty without Cruelty are 100% vegan, according to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals website. At the lower end, in 2016 Rite Aid began carrying Éclair Naturals vegan products, which cost around $10 or less. At the luxury end are early adopters like Seattle’s Herbivore Botanicals, which has won raves from Allure and Vogue magazines for its vegan, cruelty-free products.
Begun in 2011 in the kitchen of the founders, Julia Wills and Alexander Kummerow, Herbivore Botanicals first sold products through Etsy, gaining a following in the craft community. Their goal was to bring natural, plant-based products with an element of luxury. The brand took off from there, finding a large enough market to secure distribution deals with Nordstrom and Sephora. “The launch of our own website, combined with a packaging redesign which pushed a modern, minimalist palette, elevated our online presence and enabled us to reach a much broader and more diverse audience,” said Willie Frietas, Herbivore Botanicals’ assistant account manager.
Frietas sees only growth on the horizon for the vegan beauty space. “The natural beauty and skin care market is bound to keep-up its growth spurt,” Frietas said. He credits the wealth of information online and the ease in sharing it as factors contributing to vegan beauty’s success. It’s relatively simple to research products online, and plenty of bloggers and animal welfare groups have done much of the legwork for you.
Some products use no animal-derived ingredients at all, others claim they do not test on animals, and still other companies make both claims. If you need help navigating the minefield of product claims, PETA offers a cruelty-free shopping guide, and you can look for the leaping bunny symbol or visit www.leapingbunny.org.
JoAnne Dyer is a freelance editor and writer. Her editing clients include indie publishers, nonprofits, small businesses, and authors.