Are Your Beauty Products Hiding Animal Ingredients?

If you’ve recently made the decision to go vegan with your beauty products, you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed. There is a vast number of options and labels: plant-based, vegan, cruelty-free, and more. It’s not always evident which is the best choice. Adding to the confusion, animal ingredients are not clearly labeled - nor do they have to be. You may think that your “naturally derived” lotions are vegan beauty products, only to find that one or more of the ingredients is actually derived from animals.

As explained in this NY Times report, vegan beauty products are free of animal ingredients, while cruelty-free products are not tested on animals. So a vegan product could have been tested on animals, and a cruelty-free product may contain animal ingredients. Because of the confusing labels, the surest way to be certain that you are using ethical beauty products is to read the ingredient list.

Hidden Animal Ingredients

Some animal ingredients are easy to identify by name, such as wool or beeswax. But it’s not always that obvious. According to PETA, there are thousands of technical and patented names for product ingredients. And, sometimes the same ingredient, with the same name, can be derived from animals or plants or even manufactured synthetically.

Vegan makeup and beauty products are not required to have FDA approval. If you truly want to be sure that you are using products that are completely free of animal ingredients, you will have to do a bit of research.

Most Commonly Used Animal Ingredients

According to Plant Based News, these are some of the most common animal ingredients.

• Lanolin
• Shellac
• Glycerine can be animal or vegetable
• Casein - aka sodium caseinate or caseinate
• Squalene from shark liver oil
• Guanine-shimmer from fish scales
• Oleic Acid - aka oleyl stearate, oleyl oleate or tallow
• Animal Hair
• Stearic Acid-from slaughterhouses
• Carmine - aka cochineal, natural red 4, E120, and C.I. 75470
• Collagen-protein from slaughterhouses
• Elastin-protein from slaughterhouses
• Hyaluronic acid - can come from slaughterhouses or be biofermented
• Keratin-protein from slaughterhouses
• Beeswax - aka cera alba

Are these even necessary? Not according to Ethical Elephant, which assures us that the vegetable and synthetic alternatives widely available today allow for beauty products to be made without animal cruelty while still upholding their high quality and producing desired results.

The Ecco Bella Difference

At Ecco Bella, we formulate our ethical beauty products with gratitude and appreciation for our planet and all of its living beings. We care about your skin, and we care about our animal friends. Ecco Bella’s line of makeup, skin care, hair care, and parfums are effective yet vegan and cruelty-free.

Ecco Bella: Vegan Beauty Products

In our almost 30 years in business, we have developed products that produce extraordinary results for your skin, without hurting our environment. And that includes animals. We don’t use animal ingredients in our products, and they are never tested on animals.

Instead, we use botanical extracts - nutraceuticals - in our products. These all-natural ingredients are held to the same high standards as pharmaceuticals, conducting clinical trials and studies to ensure that your skin sees the benefits of Ecco Bella.

The result? Beautiful skin for you, compassion for animals.