Is the beauty industry doing enough to be cruelty free?

As we’ve just entered another lockdown, self-care days are back on the cards. You may want to spend an evening pampering yourself or wake up a little earlier to put on some makeup to brighten up your day. Whatever you choose to do, do you ever stop to question what you’re putting on your face?

When we think of ‘cruelty-free’, our mind immediately associates it with animal testing and rightly so. Although the concept of being cruelty-free heavily relies on the abolition of animal testing, it is still not clear as to what it really means to be cruelty-free.

Often we won’t stop to question what we see on the packaging of the products we purchase, which is our downfall as a generation. If we start to question things, we can exert more pressure onto beauty brands to do the right thing. Users are very quick to discredit the impact that social media has had on our society, but it allows us to apply pressure to brands to speed up their progress and hold them to account - which is especially important given that it should be an expectation that their products are cruelty-free, not a luxury.

The fact that we don’t stop to question a lot of the things we see is why it’s so easy for brands to deceive and mislead us. Greenwashing can take on many forms and the most common in the beauty industry is when brands test just one ingredient and claim that the entire product is cruelty-free, leaving us unbeknownst to the truth.

It’s all very well relying on companies to be truthful, but we also have to take responsibility for what we purchase. Finding brands you trust by doing your own research is the way forward; a quick Google search is all it takes to find brands which align with your morals. If you endeavour to become more sustainable in your beauty habits, there are five things to look out for: consider whether the product is organic, sustainable, vegan, coral-reef friendly and carbon neutral, and then you’ll be well on your way to making a difference.

There is no excuse for the biggest brands in the industry to test on animals. They are cutting corners which they can afford to avoid. They should be investing their time and resources into developing alternatives. There really is no excuse as PETA have highlighted a range of alternatives, which are more accurate in predicting the potential of a substance and they are quicker and cheaper to carry out; these include sophisticated in vitro methods which test human cells and tissue, advanced computer-modelling techniques, and studies done with human volunteers.

There is so much money in the trade, which leaves us to question why they aren’t making the changes needed. We should continue to buy items which stand for what we believe in. As consumers, we hold a lot more power than you realise - the quicker we stop purchasing unnatural products, the quicker the production of them will stop. The simple answer is that until the beauty industry is cruelty-free, they are not doing enough.

Edited by Madeleine Gill