From allure.com
By Elizabeth Gulino
Until somewhat recently, it was considered cool to curb your consumption of animals. What happened?
It seems like nobody wants to be vegan anymore. In 2024, Americans ate 7 percent more meat than they did before 2020; sales of vegan meat substitutes are declining; vegan restaurants in New York City, once a kale-based mecca, are closing left and right; celebrities like Miley Cyrus, Anne Hathaway, and Lizzo have vocally abandoned their veganism within the past five years. Slowly but surely, the once popular plant-based lifestyle is in flux—and that includes beauty products.
Until somewhat recently, it was considered cool to curb your consumption of animals, whether you were eating them or putting them on your face. It showed how healthy and eco-conscious you were (generally speaking, animal byproducts contribute significantly to greenhouse gas emissions). In the 2010s, vegan cuisine became a hit, and plant-based beauty boomed alongside it; between 2013 and 2018, vegan cosmetic launches increased 175 percent globally. The Economist went so far as to dub 2019 “the year of the vegan.”
While some research suggests that the vegan beauty market is still growing, it doesn’t exactly feel that way right now. Avoiding animal-derived ingredients, should you want to, has always taken a little bit of work, but it became much easier during veganism’s peak in the 2010s. These days, you’ll need to roll up your sleeves again. In the 2026 aisles of beauty retailers, products with animal-derived ingredients are everywhere: Many lip balms and hand creams contain lanolin, an emollient derived from sheep’s wool. Beeswax is commonly used in lip products and mascara, which also typically contains fish-scale-based guanine. Gelatine, keratin, and carmine (a dye made from crushed-up bugs that gives many red eye shadows their vibrancy) are all likely to appear on a given hair, skin, or makeup product’s ingredient label.
Sure, there are plenty of fully vegan brands out there—Hourglass, Haus Labs, Byoma, and E.L.F., to name a few—but some of them have been struggling lately. Bite Beauty shuttered in 2022, just one year after removing all animal-derived ingredients from its products. Milk Makeup, which has been 100 percent vegan since 2018, is currently experiencing “tanking” sales, according to a recent Puck report. (Allure reached out to Milk for comment and did not hear back.) We can’t say that either of these cases is specifically caused by consumer disinterest in all-vegan formulas, but the correlation is there.
“I just don't know if vegan is a top priority anymore for consumers."
So what changed? Why don’t people seem to care anymore if there are bugs in their eye shadow or crushed cow hooves in their shampoo?
For one, beauty buyers these days seem to care less about environmental impact and more about product performance. Take Glossier: In early 2023, the brand reformulated its cult-favourite salve, Balm Dotcom, to be vegan by replacing beeswax and lanolin with synthetic ingredients and castor jelly. Within a year, its fans had lodged so many complaints that the brand put the original, non-vegan formula back on the shelves in spring 2024. When we asked Glossier for more information on why it reverted, it declined to comment but pointed to a 2024 promotional video of its employees reading mean comments about the reformulation.
Something similar happened with The Body Shop. In 2021, the company pledged that it would have an entirely vegan product lineup by the end of 2023, something the brand described as a sustainability effort at the time. Although the brand achieved its goal, it has since re-introduced non-vegan products, like the Spa of the World Kukui Body Cream, which contains beeswax. The Body Shop never officially announced its retreat, but it did tell The Vegan Society in August 2025 that it brought back a selection of non-vegan products as a response to consumer complaints: “The feedback included the removal of non-vegan ingredients, such as beeswax and honey, impacted our customers’ enjoyment of some of our products.” Allure reached out to The Body Shop for comment and did not receive a reply.
Cosmetic chemist Amanda Lam describes this trend as a swing of a pendulum. “I just don't know if vegan is a top priority anymore for consumers,” she tells Allure. And they can tell the difference when their favourite products are reformulated to be vegan because they do, in fact, perform differently. “It's hard to replicate nature, regardless if it's coming from an animal or if it's coming from a plant,” she says. “You may be able to achieve the same texture and appearance of lanolin, for example, but you may not have the same spreadability, you may not have the same melting point.”
On the flip side, animal-derived ingredients have become buzzy in and of themselves; they’re seeing notable year-over-year growth, according to Spate’s 2026 Trend Report. You’ve likely heard celebrities, influencers, editors, and everyday consumers alike touting the magic of PDRN, an ingredient derived from salmon DNA (the “salmon sperm facial,” if you will). Similarly, beef tallow, lobster shell protein, honey, collagen (which usually comes from the bones of pigs, cows, or fish), and colostrum (the milk a cow produces right after giving birth) are all having a moment, despite the fact that some of them have… well, let’s call it questionable efficacy.
There appear to be two main culprits for this: conservatism and the economy. During the pandemic, right-wing political figures, namely Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sowed mass distrust in science, medical institutions, and doctors (many of whom will tell you that plant-based diets are better for your health). And, of course, after Donald Trump started his second term last year, Kennedy became our Department of Health and Human Services secretary and has since re-imagined the government-issued food pyramid to prioritize meat-eating (he abides by a “carnivore diet” himself). All the while, Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign has trickled down to everyday Americans alongside the content of mommy bloggers and influencers who now rave about things like the (unproven) powers of raw milk and the “dangers” of the chemicals in sunscreen.
By Kennedy’s increasingly popular mindset, abiding by a plant-based lifestyle became “woke.” Other “woke” things, according to Kennedy (who is not and has never been a doctor), include preventative health measures like cancer screenings. This has all helped pave the way for a renewed obsession with animal products in general, like whey protein (you guessed it: not vegan), which food companies have recently worked into every product imaginable, including but not limited to ice cream, waffles, mac n’ cheese, and even seltzer.
Besides an apparent rise in “anti-wokeness,” we can’t forget about the ever-rising cost of living. The prices of groceries and utilities have all steadily grown in the past four years, but wages have not kept pace. And while veganism isn’t inherently more expensive than other lifestyles, it can cost you more time and effort depending on where you live and what access you have to plant-based products and establishments. It makes sense that people would choose the path of least resistance when their resources are that much more precious.
While it seems like consumers are turning away from vegan products, they apparently still want to spend their money on brands that mirror their morals. Of 15,000 people surveyed globally by Edelman, eighty-four percent of people said they need to share values with a brand to use it. Those same consumers tend to look for brands that are cruelty-free (meaning they don’t test on animals), socially involved, and culturally relevant. Veganism seems to be losing its capital as a value for many Americans.
Someday, the pendulum Lam described could swing back, and vegan beauty will boom again. But virtue is a tricky thing to commodify. And some might very reasonably prefer natural products like crushed up bugs, wool oils, and beeswax to their synthetic chemical or petroleum-based vegan alternatives. Maybe it all comes down to animal instinct.
