How Do They Test Vegan Skincare Products?
Veganism is a lifestyle choice as well as a diet. Many people are embracing this because they do not want to eat or wear any products that have been derived from or tested on animals. However, vegan skincare products still have to be tested in some ways to make sure they are safe to put on the skin. How do they do that?
What Are Vegan Skincare Products?
To be vegan, a product such as this Facial Serum can’t have been tested on animals, nor can it be created with animal products. This is different from being cruelty-free, which means that although the finished product can’t be tested on animals, they can use animal testing on the ingredients. This is quite a significant difference, so you should be clear about the ingredients that go into making the product if you want to make quite sure they are vegan. Peta’s Beauty Without Bunnies program allows you to check that products that are sold to the public are actually vegan rather than simply cruelty-free.
Ingredients to Check For
One of the ways to check if a product is vegan is to look at the ingredients list. Vegan products can’t contain anything that was derived from an animal, so they aren’t allowed to include the following:
Beeswax - This comes from bees and is made by melting honeycomb with boiling water.
Carmine - This is a food dye that turns food and cosmetics red. It is made from grinding up red beetles. It is manufactured by separating the abdomen from the rest of the body and grinding it to make a powder. As you can imagine, several thousand beetles are killed to make a small amount of this product.
Collagen - Collagen is the ingredient that many supermodels say they use to look young, and it is very popular in skincare products. It is found in bones, skin, and the connective tissue of animals and is produced from cattle, horses, pigs, and rabbits. Doctors argue that the product doesn’t even work that well, even though many animals are killed to produce it.
Keratin - This product is often used in shampoo and conditioner as it is said to be good for the hair. It is produced by grinding up the horns, hooves, feathers, and quills of various animals. It is argued that natural ingredients such as rosemary and nettle work just as well without any animals having to be harmed.
Guanine - This is found in nail polish and some shampoo, and it is made from crushed fish scales. The process uses farmed fish, and the scales are scraped off and suspended in alcohol.
Lanolin - This is a greasy substance that comes from woolly animals such as sheep. Farmers squeeze the product out of the wool, and it is used to make products such as lipsticks, moisturizers, and shaving foam.
Vegan products contain a label that lets you know that they don’t include ingredients that come from an animal. There are many great skincare products that do not contain anything that has been tested on animals or animal products, such as this Sesame Ginger Scrub. They are tested and brought to the market using other methods to check they are safe for humans.
Virtual Testing
Many vegan products are tested using virtual experiments. These are computer-generated experiments that are created to replicate the way a skincare product tests on the human skin. The computer will give information based on what it already knows to tell scientists if the products are safe for humans or not. There is a lot of data already available on the subject, so it is not difficult for the computer programs to find information about what can be used on humans and what is unsafe.
Human Testing
There are hundreds of medical trials going on all the time all over the world, and people get paid to take part in them. Conducting human experiments is a way of finding out if a product is okay to use on humans. Of course, extensive virtual experiments are carried out first so that the products are not tested on humans before scientists are sure that they won’t be harmful. Conducting this type of research means that the animal testing process can be avoided.
The vegan skincare products you will find on the shelves are harmless to use and fit for purpose. If you are considering a vegan lifestyle, you should include vegan skincare and other vegan products in your decision rather than concentrating solely on your diet.