How Hard Is It to Choose a Replacement?

Since I had the equivalent of £500 in cosmetics I had already bought, just in case WW3 broke out all of a sudden, and I couldn't go to my local Boots to restock, I thought I'd phase out my "unethical" products gradually. a) I was still attached to EL, and b) I couldn't afford to throw £500 in the bin.

So I announced my brave decision on Facebook, and the reaction was overall positive, apart from one friend, who said maybe I should consider making my two guinea pigs into a pair of shoes. We don't speak that much nowadays.

What transpired, however, is that it was not going to be so easy not to use animal testing free cosmetics. Whilst some companies were open about the fact they conducted animal testing, others claimed they didn't test the final product, but behind the scenes sponsored third parties to test the ingredients.

Just to be clear, animal testing has been banned in the EU for a while (I'm not good with dates, I can hardly remember my birthday). However, due to some loophole it was still possible to sell products which had been, or with ingredients that had been tested in countries outside the EU.

It gets more complicated than this. The Body Shop, for instance, doesn't test on animals. But the parent company, L'Oreal, does. Liz Earle or Origins doesn't test on animals. But guess what - the parent company, Estee Lauder, does. And so on and so forth. Being ethical is a very frustrating and very time consuming mission, they don't make it easy for us. OK, OK, why would they?

So I resorted to my good friend Google Search. And, much to my dismay, the amount of information is HUGE, and at times confusing. In the end, I have found three websites that have proven useful:

http://nottested.co.uk/Cosmetics.html
http://www.leapingbunny.org/shopping.php
http://www.peta.org/living/beauty-and-personal-care/companies/default.aspx

I intend to expand on the difference between them, but I'll probably dedicate an entire post to technicalities. This way, if you're not interested you can just skip it.

After extensive reading (some two hours on a rainy day), I was ready to start my quest for the perfect ethical moisturizer. My skin will never forgive me for that.