Vegan Makeup Brands

To save your blushes, here is a quick round-up of vegan makeup brands to make it that bit easier when purchasing powder, buying blush, and eyeing up eye shadows. Most of the following brands have entirely vegan makeup lines but some have a few rogue nonvegan products hidden amongst their cruelty-free range so make sure to check first and, even if you’ve used a product for years, remember that ingredients change and your favourite lipstick might suddenly have its formula changed to contain animal-derived nasties.

Beauty Without Cruelty

My Personal Favourite for Vegan Makeup

Beauty Without Cruelty’s Vegan foundation/moisturiser helped cover my blushes during customer service embarrassments over the years I spent in retail. Their range also includes eyeliner, powders, eye shadow, lipstick, nail varnish, vegan mascara, and a variety of other makeup items. In recent news, the lovely Karmavore vegan shop in Vancouver has started stocking Beauty Without Cruelty products! All of their products are vegan, they have a strict policy against animal-testing, and they are becoming more widely available in North America, not just in the UK where I first encountered them.

Vegan Cosmetics – Origins

Other vegan makeup brands that should be pretty easy to find in North America include Origins, whose skincare range is largely organic, cruelty-free, and vegan, although their lip balms are not vegan as they contain beeswax or ‘cruelty-free honey’ (whatever that means). They also have a tinted SPF product which I’m currently coveting as I burn really easily. (damn English rose in North America.) Origin’s cosmetics and toiletries are also great for those with sensitive skin as they contain no parabens, phthalates, paraffin, dyes, etc etc., and they don’t test on animals or ask other companies to test their products on animals. Check out Origin’s stance on product testing.

Crazy Rumors About Vegan Cosmetics…

Crazy Rumors are a family-owned business founded in 2003 to create fun lip balms in a variety of outlandish flavours and scents without resorting to nasty synthetic chemicals that you wouldn’t want anywhere near your lips. Edie and Brian Himmel are the genius couple behind the business enterprise and they seem to spend all their time mashing up random foodstuffs to see if they’d work as lip balms. All vegan, all natural, and pretty amazing in their variety of flavours, Crazy Rumors use organic ingredients where possible and avoid beeswax or other non-vegan products in their lip balms, setting them aside from competitors. Instead, the shea butter and jojoba oil keep lips moist and kissable, tasting and smelling like a smorgasbord of natural oils, with a dash of stevia to sweeten things further. I have friends who carry every flavour of Crazy Rumors vegan lip balms on their person at all times; they should provide an ammo-belt to go with the range. Tea-flavoured lip balm is my personal favourite, appealing to my Britishness as it does.

Sugarpill

Sugarpill are a great makeup company that produce vibrant vegan cosmetics to satisfy anyone’s outlandish colour fantasies. Their products also make great gifts as their packaging is fabulous, to match the bold colours and bright palette of the cosmetics themselves. Don’t be put off by the price as their pots and potions come in pretty generous sizes rather than tiny poky vessels of three grains of shadow and a lick of liner. Various online fans have noted the creaminess and sparkliness of Sugarpill’s vegan cosmetics and they make it easy to order through their website with clear vegan labelling for all to see. All their loose eye shadows are vegan-friendly, and just over half of their pressed shadows are vegan, including the gorgeous Buttercupcake (yellow), Poison Plum (purple), Midori (green), and Afterparty (blue), Taro (white), and Bulletproof (black) – the latter two being recent additions to the vegan line of makeup by Sugarpill. Clearly this is a company heading in the right direction (vegan! Cruelty-free!), and a few words of encouragement here and there could help them along the way, so send them a nice message if you like their vegan cosmetics and want to see more.

Fyrinnae – A Rising Star for Vegan Makeup

Fyrinnae are another popular vegan makeup brand, with even non-vegans using their cosmetics as they are considered high quality. All their makeup is vegan, with eye shadows, blush, lipstick, lip gloss, and bronzer, along with a handy ‘glue’ product to keep pesky sparkly eye shadow glitter from going a-wandering. Called ‘Pixie Epoxy’, this item alone makes Fyrinnae fabulous.

Urban Decay for Vegan Makeup

Urban Decay are a fairly well-known name in the world of vegan cosmetics as they’re more of a major brand than many of their niche competitors. Making vegan and cruelty-free products they spotlight their ethical makeup with a pawprint on their website, saving you having to trawl through ingredients and write to the company. Boasting lipsticks, eyeliners, vegan nail polishes, and vegan makeup brushes, Urban Decay could fill up your whole cosmetics purse with little trouble. They do pressed powders as well as loose eye shadows and powders, and they’re often to be found next to your high-end makeup brands in large department stores making it pretty easy to check colours before buying. This is one of the considerations many vegans have when buying makeup online: it’s pretty hard to get a good idea of the texture, shade, and staying power of many vegan cosmetics. With Urban Decay you can browse in store, but make sure to check which products are vegan first by looking at their site – their Eyeshadow Primer’s no longer vegan, for example.

Cheeky Cosmetics

Cheeky Cosmetics do everything right in my book. They are environmentally-aware, vegan-friendly, make handmade vegan cosmetics using natural ingredients, and have great colours available rather than the same tired old pastel palette. Founded by the lovely Chantal, Cheeky Cosmetics emerged out of a desire to have vegan-friendly makeup for sensitive skin, particularly for those with rosacea. Even Cheeky Cosmetic’s vegan makeup brushes are created with sensitive skin in mind and the natural, cruelty-free makeup adheres to all necessary safety standards without resorting to animal-testing. The Cheeky Cosmetic products are certified by PETA and they make vegan makeup brushes, eye shadows, blush, lip gloss, lip tint, eye shadow primer, and powder foundation.

Zuzu Luxe – High-End Vegan Makeup

Now part of Gabriel Cosmetics, Zuzu Luxe is a vegan makeup company that uses natural ingredients to create sophisticated cruelty-free cosmetics. Many of their products are also gluten-free, which is pretty damn considerate if you ask me. None of their products are tested on animals, and no animal-derived ingredients are used in their cosmetics or skincare products, which are also free of synthetic chemicals.

Suncoat Products – Vegan Makeup

Suncoat products came out of the desire by one mother to find a water-based nail polish for her little girl, rather than applying a plethora of nasty chemicals to her child’s fingers. Luckily, the lady in question was a scientist working in a similar field and so she devised such a range or water-based, vegan nail polishes. It seems that the vegan aspect of the nail varnish is coincidental as she’s just begun selling a range of lipsticks that include carmine (crushed bugs). This may mean that you want to send your money elsewhere, to a company committed to veganism perhaps, but it’s good to know that Suncoat’s products are available in a variety of stores, are long-lasting, quick-drying, and suitable for children. They advertise themselves as the only available water-based nail polish but I believe there are a few other recent additions to the market, although these are not necessarily vegan. Some of Suncoat’s other products are also vegan, such as their mascara, liquid eyeliner, eye-shadow, and lip shimmer. Just beware the beautifully bamboo-packaged lipsticks as they’re not vegan.

Take a look at ViolentLips.com if you’re more adventurous with your vegan makeup as they do vegan lip tattoos and all manner of other vibrant and fun products for vegans with a fun approach to cosmetics!

Also, try Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics, Silk Naturals, SoBe Botanicals, Morgana Cryptoria, and Shiro Cosmetics, amongst other vegan makeup brands.

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