Living Vegan For Dummies - Alexandra Jamieson [75]
Other vegans have no problem continuing to wear the leather, wool, or feathered items they already own. Their attitude is more “waste not, want not.” Very few vegans will begrudge you your decades-old leather belt, or a pair of vintage shoes passed down from a grandparent.
If you want to stop wearing your animal-based clothing, consider donating it. Often, when people adopt a vegan lifestyle, they donate all their leather things, including belts, briefcases, cellphone cases, and guitar straps. By giving these items to others, the products are used rather than thrown away, and so the animal didn’t die in vain. Most people never think about the impact their purchases and consumption have on the world around them, so even slow or minor changes are an indication of your caring and empathy.
If you’re looking to get rid of old fur coats, stoles, or sheepskin jackets, a compassionate option is to donate them to Coats for Cubs. This program is run by the Humane Society of the United States, which collects fur items and distributes them to wildlife rehabilitation centers around the country. These centers use the coats as bedding to warm and comfort injured or orphaned wildlife. Some younger animals make imaginary friends out of their new fur blanket, playing and wrestling with the item as if it were a sibling. Your donation is tax-deductible and provides an amazing end to the coat of shame hanging in your closet. For information, see www.hsus.org/furfree/campaigns/c4c.
Don’t be concerned with the attitude that other people may hold about your clothing — if you cared what other people thought, you probably wouldn’t have become vegan in the first place!
Vegan Beauty Aids and Health Products
Beauty aids have been around almost as long as people. Ancient Egyptians used fly dung and animal fat to create dark eye paints for both men and women. Nowadays, some people are content to let their natural beauty shine through with no adornment, but many modern men and women still like to jazz things up a little with makeup and perfume. Modern beauty products are hiding an ugly secret, however. Sadly, most of these products come at a high price, as countless animals are killed every year to create and test cosmetics for humans to use.
Vitamins and supplements are a $20 billion business in the United States alone. While these products can be used to protect and heal your body from illness, many are nonvegan because they contain animal ingredients. For a full list of nonvegan ingredients to look out for, check the PETA Web site for their comprehensive animal ingredients list.
Fortunately, finding vegan beauty aids and health products has become easier in the last few years, because vegan certification labels have become more popular and traditional companies have begun to formulate vegan product lines. Many companies use no animal products at all and don’t test their products on animals, so they can be considered entirely vegan companies.
Waking up to your makeup
Educating yourself about the origins of the ingredients in your makeup is another step toward an integrated vegan lifestyle. You should consider two issues with beauty products:
Do they contain animal byproducts or ingredients derived from an animal source?
Were they tested on animals?
Many products advertise that they weren’t tested on animals, but they may still contain animal-based ingredients.
The term cruelty-free is used a lot when it comes to vegan products. It means that no animals were harmed in the testing or production of the ingredients used in a product. Any product with this kind of label is 100 percent free of all animal ingredients. In other parts of the world, including England, the term animal-free is more commonly used because cruelty-free labels were abused by companies that still included ingredients from animals even though they no longer tested the products on animals.
It would be difficult, to say the least, to remember all the animal and insect ingredients