I suspect a lot of people click “vegan” on the bath and body category or plug it into search engines seeking soap, perfumes, and so on, thinking “yeah…vegans have something to do with vegetarian. That MUST be natural!” Between that and the sublimely ridiculous celebrity endorsements of veganism by celebrities often later caught wearing fur in public, the label has a whole lot of confusion around it.
This train of thinking that vegan is automatically natural is wrong. And saying something that uses ANYTHING that comes from an animal is vegan is ALSO wrong.
Veganism is a whole lifestyle - not just a diet - where the person abstains from the use of any and all animal products. There are no exceptions. From beeswax to milk to common glycerins, if it originates from an animal, it is absolutely not acceptable to use if you are vegan. I once had a coworker who went vegan for a girlfriend; he had to get rid of his leather shoes and went on about it so much I caught myself fantasizing about tortuous things I could do to him with his vinyl belt.
So it’s natural to get a bit steamed by people slapping “vegan” onto something that’s clearly not. I’ve recently seen items for sale in bath and body venues that have goat’s milk, emu oil, beeswax, and musk2. These are NOT vegan. Oh, not even close. And while some vegans make an “exception” for honey and beeswax, those are person-to-person choices and not really in accord with the long-term vegan view.
Then there’s the assumption that “vegan” automatically means “natural.” There are a lot of vegan sellers who use fragrance oils - those synthetics spoken of very early in this blog. And that’s all fine and well, except that the vegan sellers have no way of knowing themselves how those fragrance oils are produced. The FDA trade secret exceptions allows companies to tell their customers nothing about the ingredients specifically in a fragrance oil. And all those synthetically manufactured materials? They still have to come from somewhere. Or specifically, something. Just as absolutely everything you see and touch in this world is chemical, absolutely all synthetic chemicals still had to start off as a component of something natural. Maybe it was a leaf extract mixed with something you can only get when you melt down a rock with acid. Maybe it was a component of horse urine molecularly fused to a piece of pinecone and melted down. If fragrance oils are involved, you can’t know for sure it’s vegan, you can only have faith in the good intentions of the body product creator, who him or herself can’t possibly know the origins of the synthetic scent.
Vegan does NOT mean natural. It’s pretty much just a tag for Thumper Is Safe, as Far as We Know.
And if it has emu oil in it, no, it’s NOT vegan.
I am not vegan because I still use beeswax and honey frequently in my scents. While I do use these materials only from organic farmers, it excludes me from a wholesale vegan label. And really, I don’t see testing on rabbits as particularly efficient. I used to chase the blasted rodents when I was growing up in Indiana, and those buggers are hard to catch. Much to time consuming, when I can simply walk up to people on the street and scare them silly by waving bottles in their faces.
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