Is The Golden Age of Vegan Beauty Products Slowing to a Halt?

As a wave of vegan, cruelty-free beauty products has hit the shelves in recent years, with many launches emerging as viral, fan-favorite selects on social media, the beauty and wellness industry has plunged itself into a raucous debate on the ethics of makeup.

While consumers were swayed by trendy new vegan launches on the market during their heyday several years back, many once-cult-classic products have fallen behind in sales and are losing out in popularity amongst clientele. For many, the act of buying vegan beauty products is spurred by ethical qualms, allergy to animal byproducts, or a simple desire to stay on top of the latest launches.

As decidedly non-vegan products containing ingredients like beef tallow, lobster shell protein, and honey are rising to the forefront of the market as highly sought-after selects, many consumers are prioritizing other manufacturing qualities—namely cruelty-free—over veganism. Why? For the large majority of users, quality and efficacy remain supreme as consumer concerns. After all, why buy vegan if other products work better? 

This was the primary motivating factor behind Glossier's recent move to revert back to their original Balm Dotcom formula. The glossy lip balm, which first went viral on social media in 2014, underwent a massive relaunch in 2023, where a new applicator and vegan formula replaced the brand's best-selling original product. Glossier product developers overhauled the original formula, swapping out lanolin—a waxy ingredient derived from sheep's wool—for a lab-created synthetic alternative, which the brand justified by promising a "more hydrating" and nourishing effect. Fans of the brand speculated that the move was a further step in transitioning into an all-vegan product line, as Glossier already has more than a few vegan cosmetics, including the High-Shine Lip Gloss and Perfecting Skin Tint, two of the label's most popular products. 

Following massive online backlash over the reformulation, Glossier made a comeback in 2024 with the announcement that it was reverting back to the original formula, much to the joy of dedicated consumers across the globe. As a brand built off a massively successful online empire and a contemporary business model, listening to consumer feedback is vital to staying afloat in an age where a new beauty product enjoys viral status, courtesy of Instagram and TikTok, every other day.

A switch back to a non-vegan formula may still present ethical concerns for some shoppers, but Glossier is flourishing nonetheless, as evidenced by the label's plans to further expand its global presence with new launches in Australia slated for 2024. While Glossier's holy grail product, the Balm Dotcom, may no longer be vegan, it is still certifiably cruelty-free, and for many consumers, that's enough. 

Other super trendy beauty brands like Lanolips, an Australian lanolin-based skincare and beauty brand on the rise, have forgone the vegan label in favor of a cruelty-free certification. Lanolips boasts a product line "minus synthetics" and potentially harmful vegan substitutes, offering shoppers simplicity rather than the faux appeal to ethics that many trendy, new-age cosmetics companies front. 

In a rapidly changing beauty market, product sales and emerging fan bases for companies like Lanolips and Glossier reflect a shift in interest toward natural, cruelty-free cosmetics with tried-and-true ingredients rather than hastily researched, synthetic-loaded vegan products. 

The viral status of companies like Gisou—favored by It girls, both aspiring and established, across the world—amplifies this collective consumer shift in shopping habits. Gisou, characterized by its line of honey-infused cosmetics and wellness products, is by no means vegan but has enjoyed a significant uptick in sales over the past year—clocking in at around $100 million total in sales, per Business of Fashion—thanks to its effective, quality line of products, aesthetically pleasing packaging design, and unbeatable marketing tactics akin to those of Glossier. The brand promotes safe bee-keeping and provides its shoppers with an extensive sustainability promise, as well as frequent glimpses into its facilities on social media. Explaining its bee-keeping and harvesting processes, Gisou said on its home webpage: "We always prioritize the well-being of the bees and let them guide our beekeeping practices to obtain Mirsalehi Honey and Mirsalehi Propolis, our key ingredients, basing our production on the harvesting cycle, and only taking their surplus if and when appropriate." While Gisou is not yet certified by Cruelty-Free International, the brand has shared that it is currently undergoing the process toward accreditation and does not test any product on animals. 

As ultra-trendy beauty brands move to prioritize cruelty-free production and mostly natural ingredients over vegan cosmetic formulations, the beauty sphere as a whole has begun to consider what sustainability truly means in an industry where waste, overconsumption, and rampant single-use plastics still reign supreme. For consumers, quality, efficacy, and fair pricing are often prioritized—justifiably—over ethical qualms surrounding veganism. For exclusively vegan cosmetics aficionados, the fact remains that niche markets for vegan beauty products still exist, but the market as a whole is making a decided shift toward cruelty-free over vegan. 

Many beauty shoppers can agree that the industry has a way to go in terms of green, renewable practices, but the shift towards natural, fair-practice ingredients marks a significant shift in collective action that presents a world of future paths for the industry to explore.