Choosing Vegan products in the market can sometimes be harder than you think. Especially when it comes to products that are for skincare and beauty. If you are someone who wants to try out vegan products or are worried how to pick them, here are some of the tips you can follow.
Check the Labels
Checking the label is an important habit to get into, whatever product you are buying. But when it comes to choosing vegan products, there are two main things on the label that you should concentrate on; the cruelty free sign and the ingredients. Remember that cruelty free sign alone does not mean the product is vegan. It can still contain animal oils or milk or another animal product. Therefore, check the ingredient list to make sure that it does not contain any animal products and the bunny sign to ensure the product is not tested on animals.
Learn the Ingredients
There are some animal ingredients that you might not be able to recognize at the first glance. They might be listed under E numbers or named as fancy confused names and when you don’t know what they mean it is easy just be misled by them. Some of the animal products that you should avoid are Carmine (Carminic acid, carmine, carmine lake, E120, natural red 4) which is a pigment taken from a crushed insect, beeswax, guanine (CI 75170) which are fish scales from dead fish, Lanolin (fat extracted from sheep’s wool), Keratin (hydrolysed animal protein, hydrolysed protein) which includes crushed bones, hooves and feathers and gelatine or collagen, made using animal skins, bones and ligaments.
Look for Alternate Ingredients
Once you know which ingredients to steer clear of, you also need to learn about alternate ingredients that are safer to use. This includes mostly plant extracts and synthetic products. Some such ingredients include, oils such as Shea butter, jojoba oil, coconut oil, almond oil, argon oil, avocado oil, Lycopene (which are pigments found in vegetables such as tomatoes, carrots or papaya), products such as Vegekeratin, soy amino acid, arginine, serine, threonine, keraveg18, wheat amino acid instead of keratin and Carrageenan and agar, gelatinous seaweed instead of gelatine or collagen.
Watch Out for Makeup Tools
It is not just your daily beauty products and cosmetics that are using animal products. Makeup tools often use animal products too. The most common example for this is the hair used in the making of makeup brushes. The hair taken from animals such as goat, squirrel, mink, sable or horse are often used in making these brushes and it is not much different than the fur industry. To avoid these, always shop for tools that use synthetic fibre and not natural hair.
Do Your Research
There are many brands that are vegan and you can easily find these with a quick search. So if you don’t know what or where to look for when shopping for beauty products or if you are doing online shopping and is having a hard time trying to find out the ingredients, do a quick Google search for vegan beauty products and you will come across some good brands. Try out a few sites such as this where you can only buy paw paw products from here for some of the best vegan skincare products you can find.
Now that you know how and where to shop for products that are vegan, shopping for your favourite and essential products will not be too hard anymore. Keep these tips in mind when you shop next time to make your shopping experience easier.
