Magickal Realism

Vegan labeling is hot-hot-hot these days, and we bath and body sellers are pretty eager to ride that bunny to a few bucks. The problem with saddling up, however, is that too many consumers and sellers alike just don’t understand the nature of the beast:

Vegan means no animal products or byproducts whatsoever.

Some people have a really hard time with this. Once, when I went to dinner with a vegan friend, we had to spend twenty minutes arguing with the waiter - he could not even conceive that she wanted a salad with no eggs, no ham, not even cheese. He actually argued with us, “You won’t be getting any nutrition!” In the end she still had to pick pieces of mozzarella out of her salad.

Vegan is not the same as vegetarian. Vegetarian is a diet choice; Vegan is both a diet choice and a total lifestyle.

A vegetarian does not partake of animal meats. Not fish, not chicken, not cow nor squirrel. However, vegetarians may enjoy milk, honey and eggs.

The part that confuses people is that vegetarian and vegan dietary requirements sometimes cross over into non-edibles, such as their soap and body products. Because decisions about what to eat are not always related to decisions about what to wear, it can leave bath and body sellers absolutely scrambling to figure out what label goes on what.

While in my opinion the best way to learn these distinctions is to try them for up to a week at the time, health allowing¹, for some people it’s just not that simple, especially those who are still deeply connected to US farming.

I see the most common mistakes in labeling on products that contain animal oils, milks, and bee products.

Neither Vegan Nor Vegetarian

• Emu Oil

The emu actually has to die in order to obtain the oil used for beauty products. This is neither vegan nor vegetarian.

Not Vegan but OK for Vegetarians - depending on the Vegetarian

• Goats’ or Cows’ Milk
• Honey
• Beeswax

There are a lot of reasons people opt for plant materials over animal materials these days for reasons beyond the usual philosophies that prompt a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. Since it’s not just the usual suspects or the usual reasons, I think that there is  growing confusion as to what and how something may be vegan or vegetarian - but here’s hoping that we’ve cleared up the basics.

1. and ignoring the insulting advertisements of PETA claiming that veganism is a great diet, ignoring a number of plus sized vegans among their own ranks [↩]

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.

¹

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.

1. image by Duolop on flickr [↩]
2. which, while it might have been synthetic, then would conflict with the “natural” label [↩]