Lush is a vegetarian company

Our stance on vegetarian & vegan

Since the beginning, Lush has only made products using vegetarian ingredients as our company was founded on the vision that cosmetic products didn’t need to be filled with animal fats and by-products to be effective. Even before Lush, during our Cosmetic To Go days, we would only use vegetarian ingredients, drawing inspiration from other realms, such as herbal medicine. Every supplier we work with must sign our Non Animal Testing Policy every year (you can find more information on this in the Non Animal Testing Principle) which is not only a continued commitment against animal testing, but also a declaration that no material supplied to Lush contains animal derivatives that are unsuitable for vegetarians. We believe cosmetics can, and should, be made with ingredients that aren’t the product or by-product of animal slaughter or harm, which are the basis of both our Non-Animal Testing and Vegetarian principles in the Ethical Charter.

Where we do use animal ingredients — now only honey and beeswax — we go out of our way to ensure that the animals are treated with respect and care. To ensure a high level of animal welfare, we will only work with beekeepers who understand the importance of working with bees in a minimally invasive way and therefore manage the beehive in a respectful manner. Co-founder Mark Constantine, even has experience keeping bees himself. We do not permit the use of damaging practices such as queen wing clipping and we actively seek out beekeepers who go beyond organic farming, by engaging with regenerative practices that have a positive impact on the local wildlife and ecosystems they interact with. As with all of our materials, we aim to work directly with the beekeepers supplying our bee-derived ingredients so that we can have better traceability of the supply network and clearer transparency on supplier standards and practice.

We are not currently looking to reformulate our products that contain honey or beeswax, which would be the last barrier to Lush becoming a fully vegan company. There are a few reasons we continue to use bee-based ingredients. 

1. It is a powerful humectant with anti-microbial and calming effects, providing great benefits to our customers’ hair and skin. 
2. We are able to have a huge impact through our honey purchases, on the communities and the environments surrounding our suppliers. Honey is an important source of income for thousands of beekeepers in our supply network. 

One example of the latter, is the Brazilian Honey in fan favourites Ultrabland and Mask of Magnanimity. In the region, honey is one of the only reliable sources of all year round income due to the arid conditions. This honey comes from native forests, meaning the conservation of these forests is crucial for these beekeepers and they take on this responsibility. 

Our Zambian Honey supplier collaborates with farmers to help them understand the relationship between trees, wildlife, and beekeeping as a source of sustainable household income. They assist former wildlife poachers in acquiring new skills that provide their families with better livelihood options than hunting wild animals. Their mission is to conserve Zambia’s natural resources and wildlife, putting an end to poaching and other harmful environmental practices, while also educating the community on the importance of conservation. In 2025, over 2000 poachers had been educated.

This principle also includes a commitment to ensure that we will always have options for our vegan customers. From the outset, there’s been a vegan selection but this is not always intentional. Products like bath bombs and bubble bars can easily be made vegan, whereas other products like hair conditioners and face masks have been harder to formulate. 

The Vegetarian and Vegan Societies

We started working with The Vegan Society in 2006, putting our vegan products through their vigorous certification process so we could use their trademark to highlight which of our products are vegan. The Vegan Society trademark represents products that:

• Do not contain any animal-derived ingredients or by-products in the finished product or anywhere along the supply chain. They examine both the ingredients themselves and their manufacturing processes.
• Has not been tested on animals by the company or on its behalf at any stage of development.
• Is not sold in markets where post-market animal testing is required by law.

We continue to use the Vegan Society trademark on over 90% of our products and between 2006 and 2025, we have registered over 2,500 products with them.

We began our relationship with The Vegetarian Society later, in 2015, and it continues to this day. Formed in 1847 in the North of England, they are the oldest vegetarian society in the world, championing the vegetarian cause and inspiring everyone to move towards a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle. 

One of the challenges we face as a business is how quickly we launch our products, which can make it difficult to register our products with the societies in good time. If you see us using the word’ vegan’ or ‘vegetarian’ on a product rather than the logo, you’ll know why that is now.

Vegan Product Reformulation

The first product we intentionally made vegan was Veganese Conditioner in 2001. This filled an important gap in our hair conditioner range, ensuring it was vegan-inclusive, and paved the way for over a decade of reformulations to make more of our products vegan.

The first ingredient that was targeted for reformulation was the dark chocolate that we were using in some of our massage bars. At the time, a lot of dark chocolate contained butterfat — the natural fat found in milk and dairy products — but there were a few brands that offered animal fat free versions, making it easy to swap out for a vegan version.

Since 2015 we’ve seen a shift in the company towards adopting even more alternatives to replace some of the vegetarian ingredients with vegan ones. We created a systemic approach to reformulate our products in order to take out dairy-based ingredients, followed by eggs and then lanolin. Our approach to reformulation has, from early on, been to find simple, basic, effective vegan ingredients, rather than trying to swap an animal derived ingredient for a complex, multi-ingredient proprietary blend of materials, which could make our products vulnerable in the long term, should the material become unavailable. Our inventors take a look at what ingredients may have a similar function, whether that is a single ingredient or a blend of them, and start experimenting with different levels in the formula. They have been known to compare formula writing to that of painting a picture… “You often do many ‘sketches’ before the final artwork is revealed”, a final reformulation that is found to have a similar (or better!) look and feel, which behaves similarly on your skin or in your hair.

Our Vegetarian principle is more important to us than ever in the face of increasing popularity for non-vegetarian cosmetics which include ingredients such as tallow, a rendered animal fat — usually beef. Marketed as a ‘by-product’ of the meat industry, ingredients like these only serve to perpetuate the animal suffering and environmental destruction that go hand in hand with industrial farming. 

In FY2024, 100% of our products were vegetarian, which will never change, and 95% of our range was vegan. This differs from the percentage of Vegan Society Registered products (90%) as we have not completed the registration for some of our newer released products.