I must confess that my sister and I are newcomers to the whole Vegan lifestyle. As many of you will probably vouch, it can be hard sometimes to find products that are completely cruel-free. Manufacturers are very sneaky sometimes and what you may think is an innocuous product may actually hurt rather than help. Avoiding meat as a vegetarian can be very easy sometimes, but trying to avoid all animal products can be a true test. When reading the labels of products it is sometimes a daunting task to try and even wrap your head around the ingredients' names, let alone trying to figure out what they actually are. To help make it a little easier, here is a new ingredient to add to your mental checklist when buying beauty products,
Lanolin.
Lanolin is not vegan.
Although lanolin does not sound bad or like it even comes from an animal it actually comes from sheep. Sadly lanolin is a wax that is secreted by and from domestic sheep. It is this wax that sheep naturally produce that helps sheep stay dry from water and rain. That is why manufacturers use this wax in things like hand creams and lotions because it makes them water resistant.
I was surprised to find out that the aromatherapy hand cream that I had purchased recently had lanolin in it. To make it worse, I thought I had been doing a good thing by buying this hand cream because it was not tested on animals.
Buyer Beware. Remember that just because it is not tested on animals doesn't mean its free of animal ingredients.
If you are looking for
kind lotions, try some of these:
Island Essence,
http://www.islandessence.com/
Aubrey Organics,
http://www.aubrey-organics.com/
Alba,
http://www.albabotanica.com/
