If you’ve got a beauty-obsessed friend or family member, finding the perfect ethical gift can sometimes be a struggle. Enter Lush.
The cruelty-free cosmetics brand may not be completely vegan-friendly, but it’s certainly making positive strides in terms of sustainability, animal welfare, and human rights. Its animal product-free options are in abundance, and its working to ensure that most of its future products are vegan too.
Here are seven ways this cruelty-free brand is helping to create a kinder world for everybody: humans, nature, and animals alike.
7 Reasons to Buy Your Vegan Beauty Gifts From Lush This Holiday Season
1. It’s Helping to Shape a Plastic-Free Future
Lush offers a multitude of plastic-free products, including soaps, shampoo bars, and shower gels. Earlier this year, the brand even launched its first-ever completely “naked” store in Milan, followed by another in Berlin. In 2017, Lush alone saved 800,000 plastic bottles from ending up in the landfill.
“When we look at the plastic waste produced by the global cosmetics industry, we know it is a problem, and we know that raising awareness is really important,” product inventor Alessandro Commisso said in a recent statement. He added, “Reducing packaging is something Lush has been working on for many, many years. From the very first day over 20 years ago, our products were naked, but now we see a bigger movement against plastic and against waste.”
To find out more about the brand’s plastic-free mission, see here.
2. It’s Fighting Against Animal Testing
Not content with every single one of its own products being cruelty-free, Lush is helping to stamp out animal testing worldwide. Every year, the brand awards businesses that are helping to find alternatives to cosmetic animal experimentation. As of last year, Lush had donated $2.37 million to initiatives working to put an end to animal testing for good.
To find out more about Lush’s mission to make a cruelty-free world, see here.
3. It Supports Environmental and Social Regeneration
Sustainability doesn’t go far enough according to Lush, which is why the brand launched its Spring Prize for regeneration. The Spring Prize awards £200,000 each year to projects that are helping to restore natural systems around the world.
“By regeneration, we mean systems and practices that take a ‘holistic’ approach to solving environmental, social, and economic problems; aiming to restore health, wholeness, and resilience,” notes the Spring Prize.
One of last year’s Spring Prize winners was the African Biodiversity Network, which received a grant of £25,000. The organization is dedicated to “enhancing biological and cultural diversity, and social and ecological justice.”
To find out more about the Lush Spring Prize, see here.
4. It Stands Up for Equal Rights
Lush is all about love, for everyone. It frequently uses its platform to raise awareness and to support important social justice issues, including trans rights. Earlier this year, the brand launched a new campaign in 250 of its North American stores named “Trans Rights Are Human Rights.” To accompany the campaign, it launched a bath melt, with 100 percent of the sale price donated to organizations fighting for trans equality.
Since it began, the company has stood up for equality across the board. In a press release earlier this year, it stated, “We’ve used our storefronts, shops, and websites to highlight humanitarian issues that impact our friends at home and abroad.”
“From welcoming refugees to North America to campaigning for marriage equality, we believe in standing up for what’s right, and taking action even when it would be easier to stay quiet and stick to selling soap.”
5. It Believes in a Fur-Free Future
Lush doesn’t only want to end animal testing, but it wants the fur trade finished too. At the end of last year, the brand launched its “What the Fur” campaign in 103 UK stores, in collaboration with the Humane Society International. The main aim of the campaign was to raise awareness of real fur marked as faux in high street shops.
“We know from our own experience that what customers want from companies is cruelty-free products, transparency, and honesty,” said Lush ethics director Hilary Jones at the event.
6. It Continuously Champions Veganism
Whilst Lush is a veggie brand – it currently uses egg, beeswax, and honey in some of its products – it understands the importance of veganism. In some of its face masks, it’s even working on replacing the egg component with tofu.
On the brands’ website, customers can find a number of articles on why veganism is important for the planet and the animals. And for Christmas, it dropped a huge range of vegan-friendly beauty and skincare products to choose from, including a golden pear made from coconut oil and cocoa butter.
To find out more, see here.
7. It Thinks You’re Great as You Are
With Lush, what you see is what you get, no tricks or small print, just natural products that make you feel good.
Some beauty brands try to peddle products that claim to reverse or slow down the aging process, Lush doesn’t make such claims, and it thinks that aging is a natural process that should be embraced anyway.
“I’d like to see less of the cosmetics industry selling a myth,” Jones told the Huffington Post last year. “In order to sell products, they’ve made women — and now, increasingly moving to men — feel that they should worry about the natural signs of aging.”
“It’s just constantly battering women with this really negative view of a natural process in order for them to sell products. And that’s especially despicable,” she concluded.
Image Credit: Lush
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