Cosmetics giant L’Oréal announced this week that they will be releasing a vegan hair dye in response to the growing natural beauty trend.
The new product, called Botanea, is the company’s reaction to the growing organic personal care market, which was worth approximately $11 billion last year, and is expected to double by 2024, according to Ernst & Young.
“We’ve managed to marry naturalness with a professional result without compromising on either point,” said Marion Brunet, head of the L’Oréal Professional Brand. L’Oréal is known for mastering the creation of quality hair products without ammonia.
However, the new product has created controversy as many animal rights groups claim that labelling a product “vegan” while testing on animals is not right and is very hypocritical. People must know that “cruelty-free” and “vegan” are two separate ideas in the beauty world; cruelty-free simply means the product wasn’t tested on animals, while vegan means that the product is free from animal ingredients.
According to L’Oréal, they do not test their products on any animals. However, as they sell in China and the Chinese market requires health authorities to test some products on animals, they are still on PETA‘s list of companies who test.
Nevertheless, the natural beauty movement is growing at an increasingly rapid rate and hopefully China will respond to that trend by eliminating the need to test on animals.
Botanea hair dyes are made with plants sourced in India and will be available in European salons in May 2018.
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