Is That Cow's Feet On Your Crow's Feet

THE SUNDAY AGE

Saturday May 22, 1993

Andrew Tyler

In the quest for ageless beauty we smear our face with parts of cows we wouldn't dream of eating, and worse. Andrew Tyler reports.

MOST cosmetic companies posture beautifully on the subject of animal testing of their products, even if their statements don't always bear much scrutiny.

``It's a bit of a gimmick to claim no testing goes on," says Murray Pearce, editor of the British trade journal `Cosmetic World News'.

``Everyone now is trying to be green. Whether there's anything solid in the claims, I don't know.

Often there isn't. ``We never test on animals" can mean that a contract laboratory does the job instead. ``Our products are never tested by anyone at all" can mean the products might not be but the ingredients that go into them are. And there are other semantic loopholes through which companies can make their greasy escape.

Now, however, comes a second phase in the battle between the beauty purveyors and those who seek to expunge animal cruelty from the trade.

By the end of next year, a new European Community directive will take effect, requiring all cosmetic products to carry explicit labelling information about what goes into them. It is bound to start a debate as campaigners and the companies themselves scramble for the moral high ground. The public is likely to be startled and, in some cases, revolted when they learn what is in their favorite brands.

The slaughterhouse has traditionally provided rich pickings for the beauty business. Left-over hooves, claws, wings, feathers, intestines and trimmed fat will all go from abattoir to renderer where they are boiled up and put through a centrifuge that extracts the various by- products.

Tallow and lard form the basis of many soaps and creams. Collagen and gelatine _ derived from tendons, ligaments, bones and skin _ are found in ``protein" products such as shampoos. Acids and fats can end up in deodorants, foundation creams, lipsticks and bubble baths. More ``specialist" rendered items include powders made from extract of cows' ovaries or brains.

Then there is the use of the animal hormones civet, musk and castoreum by upmarket perfume-makers who wish their scents to linger longer on the skin. All three are extracted from the anal sex glands of living animals. Musk comes from deer especially farmed for the purpose, castoreum from captive beaver and civet from caged civet cats.

The trade in the last two is particularly barbaric, says Alan Long, an organic chemist and committed vegan whose mother, Kathleen, co-founded the cosmetic company and charity Beauty Without Cruelty in the early 1960s.

``The animals produce these excretions when they are sexually excited or stressed," says Long. ``They are put into this state by being tormented until they lose their temper, then are scraped with crude wooden spatulas before being returned to their cages ready for the next time. It is a vile form of intensive farming done mostly in India and South America.

THE customers, however, are the expensive perfumers, generally French and American.

When asked for information about use of animal-derived ingredients, including the anal hormones Estee Lauder specifically stated that it eschewed all use of civet, musk and castoreum; that was in a phone conversation. In a formal written statement, the company would only say, ``No animal testing is done on Estee Lauder products. We list ingredients on the packaging in countries where it is the practice.

L'Oreal responded with an equally opaque statement which began by pointing out that ``cosmetic formulations are very complex and varied". The company supported the EC labelling initiative; was ``continuously finding new natural ingredients"; did not use human placenta or ingredients from protected species; and ``over 55 per cent in weight of the ingredients we use are of vegetable origin". Animal- derived material is present in ``only a few" products; no mention was made of civet, castoreum or musk.

Elizabeth Arden, failed to respond, despite prompting.

THE reference by L'Oreal to placental material points to another contentious category of animal ingredient. Stories early this year reported that placentas obtained from Russian abortion clinics were going into expensive ``anti-wrinkle" face creams on sale in the West.

It was reported that every day a tonne of placental material was being trucked out of Russian clinics to France where, after processing, a proportion of the stuff was diverted to the cosmetics industry; the majority went into medical products.

A French cosmetics firm, RoC, was identified as a user. But while RoC admitted that its Eye Contour Gel and a night cream used human placentas (``Allowing the wearer to age serenely and in total beauty," according to the ads), these were said to be taken from full-term French mothers, not Russian abortion clinics.

Part of the problem in finding out for sure what goes into a manufacturer's product is that even when there is an ingredients list, it is often designed to entrance rather than inform. Terms such as ``natural bio-proteinic concentrate" and ``exclusive hydro- structuring agents" don't take the customer very far. The new EC regulations are likely to impose more precision on the producers, or at least enough to allow specialist campaigners to de-code on behalf of the lay consumer.

For customers presently worried about placentas in their night creams, the human sort are still to be found only in top-of-the-range preparations. Animal placentas are also comparatively infrequently used, due to the expense of collecting them at the farm gate.

According to organic chemist Alan Long, however, this situation is beginning to change as more and more ``surplus" dairy cows end up going to slaughter while still pregnant.

``A crude kind of caesarean is performed at the slaughterhouse," says Long. ``If the calf survives, it will immediately be killed and processed. If it comes out as a foetus, then, along with the placenta, that will end up in the renderer's pot." Guardian