Tuesday 11 September 2007

The Body Shop Vegan Policy

Following up my earlier article I thought I would email The Body Shop to find out their policy on vegan products. This was the answer I recieved:

The Body Shop chooses not to produce a list of these products, as we do not claim to be a Vegan company.

While we have a policy of avoiding the use of raw materials derived from animals where the animal is slaughtered to directly provide the material for use in cosmetic products, manufacturers of synthetic chemicals for use in the cosmetics industry obtain input materials from both animal and plant sources (fatty acids, for example, can be obtained from both palm oil and animal fats) and we have no visibility or control over these raw materials several layers down in the supply chain. That said, we do specify that grades of materials such as surfactants are from plant sources where raw material suppliers offer both plant and animals sources as options.

Hence, we cannot guarantee that a product only contains raw materials that are synthesized from ingredients derived from plants and not animals.


I wonder why they find it so hard to have vegan products when they used to know which products were vegan....laziness perhaps?

3 comments:

Michelle said...

I have noticed that people are still looking at this post and would like to point out that since being taken over by L'Oreal there is nothing vegan at all about The Body Shop as it's profits go to a parent company who fund animal experimentation. I now shop at Superdrug and Co-op (buying their own brand items which carry the BUAV symbol) or Lush, if I am looking for high street cosmetics.

Amanda Erickson said...

Thank you so much for posting this, it's very helpful!

Amanda Erickson said...

Thank you so much for posting this, it's so helpful!