L’Oréal Group Bans Animal-Hair Brushes After PETA Push
For Immediate Release:
January 14, 2021
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382
After PETA and nearly 80,000 members of the public urged Baxter of California, which is owned by L’Oréal Group—the largest cosmetics and beauty company in the world—to ban badger-hair brushes, L’Oréal Group agreed to ban all animal hair, including from badgers and goats. In thanks, PETA has sent the French company a box of delicious vegan chocolates.
“Every badger- or goat-hair brush represents a sensitive animal who endured a violent death,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “L’Oréal Group’s compassionate decision will help PETA push the beauty and art industries to embrace synthetic brushes that don’t harm a hair on a badger’s head.”
A PETA Asia video exposé of China’s badger-brush industry revealed that badgers are captured from the wild or bred and confined to small wire cages on farms. At the end of their short, miserable lives, workers beat them and slit their throats for brushes used for paint, makeup, and shaving. One animal continued to move for a full minute after his throat had been cut.
A PETA exposé of the goat-hair industry revealed that workers castrated goats, mutilated their ears, cut off their skin during shearing, and stitched up their wounds with a needle and thread, all without any painkillers. Farmers admitted that after shearing, many goats die of exposure to the cold wind and rain. One man said that in just one weekend, 40,000 goats died of exposure.
L’Oréal Group is among the nearly 100 brands—including Procter & Gamble, which owns The Art of Shaving; The New York Shaving Company; and Beau Brummell—that have banned badger-hair brushes after talks with PETA. The group is now calling on Blick Art Materials to follow suit.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, which is a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
