The basics

* Stopping all animal testing is something Lush cares passionately about. Not a penny of our money - your money too - goes to any company which carries out, funds or commissions any animal testing.

* Lush does not buy any of the raw materials that make our products from any company that tests anything on animals. There are alternative tests which can be used.

* We buy raw materials from any company that can sign a declaration saying they test none of their raw materials on animals now and have no plans to do so in the future. Eg if we want to buy glycerine which is not tested on animals but the company tests other materials on animals we will not buy from them. If the raw materials company tests glycerine for a food product, even though we want to use it in a cosmetics product, we still will not buy it from them.

* This policy means that we can be certain that the profits our raw material suppliers make from us do not go back into animal testing. It means that we do not do business with companies whose ethical stance is at odds with ours and who are doing things that we find unacceptable or that compromise our beliefs. Companies who test at the moment but decide to stop testing and see the light can sell to us immediately.

The history

Lush has been at the forefront of campaigns to prevent cruel, unnecessary testing for years. We believe that there is no way to justify testing cosmetics or any of their ingredients on animals. The only way to check that they are safe for humans is to test them on humans. So this is what we do.

There are well known cosmetics companies which comply with anti-cruelty organisation’s standards and still buy ingredients from companies which carry out animal testing. Cosmetics companies can buy those ingredients which are not tested on animals from organisations which still animal test other ingredients. They can still satisfy anti-cruelty guidelines if they use ingredients which are not tested for cosmetics purposes but are still tested on animals for food use. This includes colour. Colours must be re-tested if a food company wants to increase the level which they are using. Why bother? Surely we ought to be campaigning to reduce artificial colour levels in food, not using it to justify animal testing. The money you spend on cosmetics which have the right to carry an official anti-cruelty mark may be going towards paying for animal tests. We don’t think this is right. We think that everyone should adopt our policy.

The Cosmetics To Go (the company we had before) and Lush creative team have been in the cosmetics business since the 1970’s. We had a lot to do with introducing the 5 year rolling rule (that raw materials can be bought from any company that can sign a declaration saying they have not tested that material within the last 5 years for use in cosmetics), getting animal testing talked and thought about and were a major influence on The Body Shop’s policy. But as time went on we began to feel that more needed to be done. Raw materials suppliers were still animal testing and did not seem to find the policies enough of an incentive to make them stop.

‘Fixed cut off date’ started to become the accepted policy but we felt uncomfortable that this meant a company could profit from us while still testing things on animals. Under this system each company selects their own cut off date – they then cannot buy ingredients that have been tested since that cut off date. Raw materials can be bought from any company that can sign a declaration to say that they have not tested that material since the stated cut off date for use in cosmetics.

Fixed cut-off date policy focuses attention on the ingredients, not on the company that makes them. These policies don’t stop companies testing on animals; they do give the more cynical cosmetics companies a way to get round the rules. They are all about the past; they do nothing to change the present or the future. With a fixed cut off date even if a company stopped testing we could not reward them with our business because if our fixed cut off was say 1980 and a company decided to stop testing in 1990 we could NEVER buy any of the that they had tested during that 10 years ingredients off them. Therefore, why would the company bother to stop? what incentive is that for them to go through the upheaval of changing their business practices? It was a dilemma! So we cast aside the rolling rule and the fixed cut off date and re-thought what it was we were trying to achieve.

We decided that the simple aims we had were for animal testing to be reduced, for raw materials companies to change the way they tested and for no money to go to companies who were so morally unsound. We then decided that the only way to achieve this was to have a policy that could give raw material suppliers a financial reason to stop testing NOW, TODAY! So our policy was born. If we can persuade a company which tests on animals to stop testing then we will buy from them as soon as they stop. If a company we buy from starts to test again then we will no longer buy from them. In the past, members of the Lush team have persuaded two ingredients manufacturers to stop animal testing completely. We did this by pointing out the alternatives and by offering to buy their products from the point at which they stopped.

Stop testing today, say you will not test in the future and we will give you our business. Simple. We believe that this is the only worthwhile position to adopt and we urge all cosmetics companies and anti-cruelty organisations to adopt this policy.