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. Gelatin, 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.