Tropics isn’t a professional skincare range. It’s pretty difficult to carve out a business applying products that others can easily buy for themselves. Your focus has to be about selling the products.
The main challenge is that skincare focussed brands won’t want to limit the products that they can use, they may be very ethical and refuse to use anything associated with animal cruelty, but it’s pretty difficult to ignore the traditional benefits of many animal based products.
It’s also about knowledge and transparency. For instance there are lots of trace ingredients that never make it on to an ingredient list and a small supplier may never truely know what’s actually in their raw ingredients. For instance if I ring up Environ and ask then if something is vegan, they’ll tell me that the beta carotene (a plant based ingredient) in their products is preserved with a product that can be made with both vegetarian and animal ingredients and it isn’t possible to analyse it to check for possible contamination. - it’s trace,,,and doesn’t come off a dedicated vegan supply chain so not even the manufacturer really knows what’s in it!
That sounds really weird, but imagine this, you buy oats, you imagine they are gluten free, but what if birds have dropped wheat seeds over the oat field - there might be gluten grains contaminating the oats. You imagine it’s vegan - but what if insects or mice are caught up in the harvesting or processing of the oats? There is a religion called Janism who are so careful to avoid harming other life that they won’t eat root crops in case harvesting harms tiny creatures (I have a friend who feels it’s ok to eat radishes and baby turnips smaller than a thumb) and all of this concern and care ignores the vital role animals play in pollinating our crops and keeping them healthy. Hardly anything would grow without worms and bees, insects and birds.
You might say that this it taking things to silly extremes, but ethically, if you need commercial beekeepers to pollinate almond orchards supplying vegan milk (a process that stresses the bees so much that it’s basically a bee Holocaust, because no animal naturally lives off a monoculture), is it immoral to harvest beeswax from those hives? Surely it’s up to the consumer to decide where they draw the line, not the producer to say what is and isn’t disclosed?
I am a fully vegan friendly salon, so all of my services have vegan options but I do carry a few cruelty free products with animal derived ingredients from suppliers I know and trust who are completely ethical and concerned to reduce their impact on the environment - because I am results focussed. I use vegan facial products across several well established brands - I know that many small brands labelled as vegan are simply clueless about their supply chain and imagine that the label on the tin tells them exactly what’s inside and that isn’t true of anything.
