Testing On Animals

When my mother was younger, she spent time out of her life contacting major cosmetic companies asking them a very short, very simple question. Do you test on animals? Back in the 80s legislation protecting animals from cruelty wasn’t as advanced and successful as it is today. My mum has always loved animals and been horrified at the idea of mindless animal cruelty; today she was telling me about a conference she’d been too in her 20s in a well off area in London, where Joanna Lumley was appealing against the culling of seals in Canada. Little did I know, she also wrote many letters to many people appealing for animal cruelty to be stopped and today we managed to find them. Reading through page after page of responses to her letters makes me a very proud daughter (my mum is awesome). 

As you can probably guess, from the existence of this blog post, both of us share the same ideals. This is not meant to be a judgement of those who do use products that may be tested on animals, or to those who aren’t aware or don’t care about it, or an effort to make myself seem like a perfect, angel child, it’s merely my insight into something that I think is of great importance.

As you probably are aware, animal cruelty stretches very far into many dark corners of the world and the immorality happens in an endless list of ways; if you watch the news you’ll have seen the continued effort to protect against poachers mindlessly killing elephants for the illegal trade of ivory and how the unnecessary use of palm oil is causing rain forest habitat loss and orang-utan genocide. Today I saw a man yanking at a dog that had a thick metal chain round his neck, he was shouting obscenities at it and to me, that’s cruelty.  Whether it’s a critically endangered orang-utan or a laboratory rat, it’s still cruelty. I think animal testing for cosmetics is an appalling practice of absolutely mindless cruelty.

Europe has banned animal testing for cosmetics which is fantastic, but it doesn’t make it impossible for companies to test on animals outside of Europe. The thing that irritates me the most about animal testing is that it isn’t a legal requirement for companies to put ‘This is made by a company that tests on animals’ on the front of their products. It is a problem of supply and demand and if everyone opened their minds to the ethics of the companies their lipsticks or shower gels come from, maybe they’d think twice about buying them. It sounds extreme but it happened with the sales of cigarettes, you don’t see a packet without a dramatic, health warning of a blackened lung splayed over the front. Or that colour wheel of calories and fat in our food; another effort to solve a problem.

When I go shopping, which is relatively often (I have needs), I love to find products that I know are made in the RIGHT way; that don’t require caged rats or injections into rabbits. There are so many companies that ARE cruelty free. I urge you to give it a go. Next time you go to buy something, check the back and see if it’s cruelty free (you’ll most likely see a bunny logo). You can't deny, animals are awesome and so is protecting them, so let's all be beautiful AND kind. Live long and prosper. 

 LUSH Fresh Handmade Cosmetics and Bomb Cosmetics both make adorable, animal friendly products. As you can see from this small segment of my very large collection - I LOVE their bath bombs.