So, you’ve filled the fridge with oat milk and stocked up on tofu, but if you’re really committed to veganuary, then you’ve probably started to inspect the contents of your bathroom cabinet, too. To finally get to grips with what it really means to opt for vegan skincare, keep reading.

Quite simply, vegan skincare products are those that contain no animal-derived ingredients in their formulation. That means you’ll find no animal extracts inside (think things like animal-derived collagen) nor any animal by-product, so that counts out everything from milk to beeswax, honey to lanolin, silk to carmine (a colourant sourced from beetles).

Opting for vegan skincare is simply a lifestyle choice and so in skincare terms, their vegan status doesn’t necessarily make these products any more or less efficacious. The way we see it, in terms of effectiveness, what a product contains is far more important than what it leaves out.

Not quite. ‘Cruelty-free’ is widely used to describe products that haven’t been tested on animals (although that as a term is a minefield in itself!), whereas ‘vegan’ usually speaks to the ingredients. That means cruelty-free products sometimes contain non-vegan ingredients, too.

Like any skincare term, you have to be careful. Just because a product says it contains ‘vegan ingredients’, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s totally vegan – spend some time checking the ingredients list to be sure. And while there are a few certifying bodies that lend vegan products a seal or symbol of approval, this certification can be expensive to obtain, so not all vegan brands use it.

That totally depends on your unique skin. If you want help turning your routine fully vegan (or with anything else for that matter), click the link below to book in for a Holistic Skin Session with your very own personal Skin Mentor.