Shouting about the disgrace of our society. We need to face upto the fact that killing animals is just unacceptable. Do something worthwhile today. Be vegan.
I got a new app for my iphone yesterday called crazy facts. A cute little app for those short moments of boredom. I was quite amused by some of the facts I learnt, including the fact that a lot of lipsticks contain fish scales. Not being someone who gets all my facts from things like iphone apps I decided to check that out and here I found confirmation that lipsticks, mainly those with a shimmer effect (and the same for shimmery nail varnishes etc). Not many cosmetics companies will give answers to what is in their products so the safest bet is to always choose a vegan company. Arbonne is one such company or you can get a list from PETA of all companies that do not use animal parts or test on animals. In the meantime I would like to share a lovely blog post I found by Cecil Adams www.thestraightdope.com. Here it is!
Dear Cecil:
Does lipstick contain fish scales? I saw this in a list of fun facts making the rounds by E-mail.
Who comes up with these lists? Yeah, lipstick contains fish scales. Some lipstick, anyway. This could be the first E-mail factoid in the history of the Internet to have some grounding in reality. Sooner or later you knew something was bound to slip through.
The ingredient under discussion is called pearl essence. (Some sources give this as “pearlescence.”) It’s the silvery stuff found in fish scales that’s used in some lipsticks, nail polishes, ceramic glazes, etc., to make them shimmery. Pearl essence is obtained primarily from herring and is one of many by-products of large-scale commercial fish processing. Synthetic versions have been developed, but to what extent they’ve supplanted the natural variety I hesitate to say. The cosmetics companies were not forthcoming and I got contrary stories from different industry observers. Fishermen still collect the stuff, though, and one presumes it’s being put to good use.
What was interesting to me–I got numerous inquiries about this–was that people are still alarmed to discover that consumer products contain (oh, ick!) animal body parts. Gang, one hates to harp on this, but get a grip. Most of you eat hunks of dead animal every day! You wallow in the flesh of critters that once gamboled in the gardenias! (Frolicked in the foam, whatever.) You want the pearl essence to go to waste? It would otherwise be left over after they extracted the more obviously useful parts of the fish, and surely it’s preferable to have the stuff wind up on the lips of women than on some heap of toxic slag.
Still, one wants to be thorough. I contacted People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, figuring that any organization with the balls to urge college students to drink beer rather than milk because dairying hurts the cows was sure to have a horror story or two about how we oppress fish. No response, although you have to assume the hook and net thing isn’t good. Prowling about on the Web I did find this description of how pearl essence is harvested: “The purse seine draws the herring up from the bottom and into an ever-decreasing circle, where the pumper [boat] pumps the fish out, and into the hold of the buyer’s boat. In the meantime, due to thrashing in the seine and going through the pumper, nearly all of the herring scales are removed and diverted into bags on the pumper’s deck.” This is perhaps not the world’s kindest process. I also learned that global herring production is threatened by overfishing, raising the specter of a world full of nonshimmering lips.
Pearl essence is just one of a long list of unsuspected animal ingredients in cosmetics. If you think fish scales in lipstick is gross, get a load of cerebrosides, used in skin-care products to create a smoother skin surface, increase moisture retention, heighten “luminosity,” etc. According to the Food and Drug Administration, “the raw material for cerebrosides in cosmetics comes from cattle, oxen, or swine brain cells or other nervous-system tissues.” Eww.
If you’re bothered by this sort of thing you might prefer to get your cosmetics from environmentally aware companies such as Aveda. In addition to minimizing the use of synthetics and volatiles, Minneapolis-based Aveda relies on plant- rather than animal-based ingredients. “Some colors, for example, are very difficult to create without using carmine, but the company decided that crushing insects to derive the ingredient is unethical,” we read. One smiles, but in the era of the rape of the rain forest it’s charming to hear about a company so good-hearted that it wouldn’t hurt–well, if not a fly, at least a Dactylopius coccus.
I used to eat meat, wear leather and basically had the same contempt for animals which I see on a daily basis everywhere I look. I became a vegetarian after seeing newborn lambs prancing around and not wanting to be responsible for them being murdered. I became a vegan when I was thinking of breastfeeding my son and finally understood what the dairy industry is all about. What I know now, I did not know then. No longer living in ignorance, I have no option but to write this blog.
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I received an email from the Marketing Co-ordinator of PETA last night, the same day as posting up this article. I did not contact them so it is great to know they are looking at vegan related blogs. They said that they are sorry they did not reply to the article quoted in the post and that they are happy to answer questions and give support to people needing information. Thanks PETA.