Good news for vegans everywhere! Kat Von D is inching closer toward her pledge to create a 100% vegan beauty line. After a roller coaster of internet battles and massive Too Faced collabs this summer, she's got news that caters specifically to animal lovers. Von D has always been adamant about branding her cosmetics as vegan and plans on making that happen ASAP, but it's a long process that involves eliminating all animal by-products — and boy, you’d be surprised at how much of those there are in your makeup bag.
When it comes to creating highly pigmented colors, some ingredients have been a given in beauty labs for ages. For example: Carmine, an ingredient sourced from insects, like beetles, is most likely in your favorite red lipstick. Or in the beige hue included in Von D's Sage eyeshadow palette. The upside is that alternatives do exist, according to the Environmental Working Group. Grapes, beets, turmeric, saffron, carrots, chlorophyll, annatto, and alkanes can replace the ingredient — it just takes a lot of patience to change tried-and-true formulas.
Even though Von D has a long and impressive list of products already in her range that are tagged as #vegan, she wants to take on the challenge of ridding her whole line of non-vegan ingredients. Back in July, Von D told vegan lifestyle magazine, Laika, "We have been reformulating anything that had carmine in the past, and if we can’t reformulate, we just throw them out...I can live without a purple eye shadow, it’s fine."
We're in full support of that. And we finally have a rough ETA on when these cruelty-free products will roll into our nearest Sephora: Von D’s Instagram post reveals that she’ll be introducing the vegan-version of her Shade + Light 2.0 — "with REFILLABLE PANS!!” — very soon. Score!