Animal friendly hair colouring

Written by ilja — September 6, 2021

I’ve been dyeing my hair for… well, longer than I can remember ^^’. I don’t colour it a lot, because I’m too lazy, but also because there’s always that little voice in my head pointing out that these products may not always be very ethical. I finally decided to check out what products there are that are more ethical. What I’m looking for is hair colouring that

  • Isn’t tested on animals
  • Is vegan
  • Is not from a big multinational (or better yet, is from a coop, but I don’t think any I found are that)

Companies will often use marketing to cover up for what they miss in ethics. The so-called greenwashing and openwashing are examples of that, and I have no reason to believe that companies wouldn’t do the same thing here. When a company claims that their products are vegan and not tested on animals, it should be recognised by animal rights organisations like Peta or Gaia. What’s more, when a company says they are vegan, but it’s not recognised by either of them, I’ll consider that veganwashing (is that term coined yet? Now it is -^).

Note that vegan typically implies that no animal testing was done, but a company who doesn’t test on animals isn’t always vegan.

Resources

It’s not my goal to make an extensive list of all producers of hair colouring products, but to have a good selection for myself to start and share what I’ve learned through this blog post.

Both Gaia and Peta have search engines to look for products, but I found them lacking for the specific things I need, so I looked a bit further and found an artcile by Peta that lists several producers for cruelty free hair color.

From this list I filtered out several producers. The reasons for being filtered out are

  • Some didn’t seem to have hair colouring products (or not any more?)
  • Some where owned by a big multinational
  • Some claimed to be vegan, while Peta doesn’t list them as such. I consider them to be veganwashers and therefor worse than non-vegan products where the producer is at least honest about it.
  • There were also some whose site was basically unusable. This was a combination of way too much pop-ups and important parts of the site not loading because it was blocked by uBlock Origin. The latter tells me they are purposely loading stuff from malicious locations, which makes me seriously question their feel for ethics.

Note that I didn’t necessarily filter out non-vegan producers. If I can get vegan products, then I’ll choose that, but I wanted to keep these as a backup in case the I can’t get fully vegan products. So in the end, I ended up with two lists. One vegan and one non-vegan.

For the vegan list I only have three producers

For the (non-vegan) backup list, I have

Things I want

Now that I have a short list of suppliers, it’s time to see if they have what I need. I listed some colours I’m interested in and checked the sites one by one to see if they have it. The results are listed here. Note that the colours I’ve listed here aren’t the only ones you can get, there’s much more, these are just the ones I’m interested in.

I added a (p) and (s) for permanent and semi-permanent respectively. I’ve seen supposed permanent that washed of after a couple of weeks, while some semi-permanent can last about as long with good enough coverage, but I believe it can still give some idea on how long it may last. I also noticed later that not everything ships to where I live, so I added that here as well. I also added when something is non-vegan.

As you can see, I found most of what I wanted with the vegan products, yay! For bleach, the only one I find doesn’t ship outside of the US, so I can’t get that one. I did find a non-vegan one, so maybe I can consider that when I have the need for it. The black colour doesn’t ship to my country either, but if the raven black is good enough, then I don’t actually need black, since I prefer raven black anyhow.

I’m not gonna buy all of them at once. I have more than enough bleach already to last a couple of years for example, and even for the hair colouring, it’s not that I colour my hair that much. It was an interesting search because I’ve seen what I can and can’t get and it’ll be interesting to test some of these out. To start, I ordered Arctic Fox Hair Color’s Transylvania and Virgin Pink.

Aftertought

Instead of buying from a US supplier, it may be easier and better to just buy from a local supplier. I checked the shop I normally go to. The shop itself is a big chain, so it’s not that I’m supporting local business by going there, and there were only three brands they have that were listed by Peta as not testing on animals. Neither were vegan and there simply wasn’t much choice in general.

All of this is just a start in a bigger search and I don’t know how deep I’ll follow the rabbit hole. But If you have feedback on what I’ve written here or tips on cruelty free products that may be interesting for me, please do let me know!

This article is under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Log in, or use your Fediverse account to interact with this article

Comments

No comments yet. Be the first to react!