Last year I became a vegetarian. At first it was simply an experiment, a test of my will power. I told myself I would only do it for a month. But as the end of the prescribed four weeks came and went, I remained off meat.
I realised two key things after only a few days as a vegetarian.
1. I wasn't really a big meat eater anyway. The only difference that the deliberate lack of meat in my diet made was that I paid more attention to where I was getting my iron and protein from. Rather than eating a small piece of chicken or fish and thinking that would suffice my daily needs for iron I now eat plenty of dark green vegetables, so much so that my anaemia has actually improved.
2. I couldn't justify another creature having to die when I could get all of my necessary nutrients and live a much healthier lifestyle on a largely plant based diet. When it came down to it, I could not see how me having a piece of steak for dinner was more important than the life of a cow.
The second realisation is the one that has filtered into various other aspects of my life. I soon began to question how my life choices, beyond my eating habits, might be damaging to animals. If I didn't want to put products of animal cruelty and death inside my body, how could I continue using products of animal cruelty on my body.
Cruelty-free beauty is something that I have a love/hate relationship with. I love it for the obvious reasons, but having consciously been purchasing only cruelty free beauty products for a while now I am all too aware of various draw backs.
- Firstly, reliable cruelty free products can be difficult to find.
- Secondly, a lot of cruelty free products, for reasons I cannot understand, are just subpar to the more popular brands on the market that we may be used to.
- Thirdly, cruelty free beauty seems to come with a much larger price tag than those that test on animals - again I don't understand this.
However, I have managed to comprise a little bundle of gems that I wholeheartedly adore and recommend to anyone who will listen.
