I've gone cruelty free and you should too!

I love makeup. I do. There is something so great about accentuating the things you love about yourself while camouflaging any flaws that you may think you have.  I love the reaction that women have when they look into the mirror after I apply a bit of makeup and they see how gorgeous they are in their reflection.  Their confidence goes up. I love that.

I also love sharing my thoughts about things I love and have learned with others. I have gone back and forth about having a blog on my website. At first I was all about having a blog and sharing my thoughts.  Yet after a few weeks I deleted it. 

The main reason I wanted to start a blog was because I have been living in Japan on an American military base and I wanted to share with others the makeup products I found while out exploring Japan. I love the idea of experimenting with products I had not heard of in America.  The few posts I wrote were about products I had found out in town, and I liked them a lot. But I chose to delete these posts because I felt hypocritical.

Why did I feel this way? The cosmetic lines were not cruelty free. Over a year ago I decided to become a vegetarian. Actually, I eat a lot closer to vegan, but it is VERY hard to find vegan food while dining out in Japan. Dashi is used in almost everything and I enjoy dining out with my omnivore husband, so I choose to not have a strict vegan diet and I am ok eating foods with this common ingredient.  Though I know once we return to the states I will go back to not eating anything that is an animal byproduct.  

Choosing to eat without harming animals has led me to want to live a cruelty free lifestyle. This has made me rethink my cosmetics use.

I love makeup, and I love to feel pretty, but after learning what animals truly go through during cosmetic testing I decided to look into the cosmetics I had been using. Are you familiar with animal testing? Let's just say it's not pretty.  They do not just put some mascara and lipstick on a bunny and see how it reacts.

A lot of cosmetic lines use some sort of animal derived ingredients, and do animal testing.  I feel that when you purchase a product you are choosing to vote for that company with your dollar.  I have decided that I will only buy cruelty free products, preferably vegan.  I have begun replenishing my makeup kit exclusively with cruelty free products. I am also going to try to have most, if not all, of those products from here on out be vegan. We should not chose to make ourselves beautiful by being ugly towards another living creature.

I  going to use my blog as a way for me to share as I explore the world of cruelty free and/or vegan beauty products. Some that I love and some that I didn't find all that great. I hope you join me on this beautiful cruelty free journey.

Cruelty-Free cosmetics used on the beautiful Oma G: Urban Decay, Makeup Geek, NYX, Dinair, Ardell lashes

Do you use cruelty free products? An easy way to check if the cosmetics you use are cruelty free is PETAs  Beauty Without Bunnies searchable database.