Lately, I've seen a lot of confusion over two terms that once seemed to me to have a very logical meaning: vegan and cruelty-free. Sounds consistent, doesn't it? However, when I made some research, I realized that it is not that simple and that's why today I want to tell you a little about what I found.

Well, before searching I thought vegan means that it does not have animal ingredients and cruelty-free means that they did not experiment on animals, and to a certain extent I thought that this went hand in hand, that is, that they were practically the same and besides, this was black and white.

Also, I believed that if you bought a vegan product, you also make sure it was clean because of course, the first thing you think of when you hear vegan is something green and virtuous.

But no.

Vegan and cruelty-free doesn't necessarily mean that an ingredient list is clean, green, or all-natural.

A product that is vegan does not contain any animal ingredients or ingredients derived from animals. This includes honey, beeswax, lanolin, collagen, albumin, carmine, cholesterol, gelatin, and many others.

Is it the same as cruelty-free?

Attention: Just because it is vegan doesn't mean it's cruelty-free. For a product to be, there must be no form of animal testing at any point in the creation of a brand's products.

For example, it is common for companies not to test the final product on animals, but to do so in the production process or to use ingredients that have been tested on animals by a third party.

And of course, a product can be cruelty-free and not vegan.

See? It was a little more complicated than what I proposed at the beginning.

How do I make sure a product is vegan?

The easiest way, beyond what a label says explicitly that it is, is learning to read it.

How do I know that a product is cruelty-free?

Here, there is a little more control since there are different organizations such as Leaping Bunny, which have dedicated to listing the companies that are NOT cruelty-free, and of course, those that are.