“Integrity is what you do when no one else is around.” The girl below? She’s me, a year ago. That is my skin and my hair.
Someone told me that once. Recently I was in San Francisco for work. On Fillmore Street, I popped into a shop, looking for something specific.
I had read about this amazing hair treatment. I use Dalby Day Skin Smoothing Serum for a lot of purposes, but I am just like any other girl out there. I like my variety of hair care, skin care, and other essentials.
But the day I decided to create Dalby Day Skin Smoothing Serum was the day I literally stood up and threw away a very expensive bottle of cream I had been using for Keratosis Pilaris.
Why? Because it was tested on animals. My expensive prescription cream for Keratosis Pilaris was tested on animals and I had just researched to confirm this. I stood over my trash bin and decided, it did not matter what the outcome, I had to retain my integrity. No one was with me and I could have made a completely different choice.
Animal testing is something that I believe, when used for cosmetic purposes, is inexcusable and wrong. There is no reason with the science we have today that anyone needs to test on animals. Public opinion recently swelled to stop a farm opening up in the UK whose sole purpose was breeding and selling Beagles to laboratories for testing. Yay!
Who in their right minds could hurt a helpless animal just to look pretty?
The great news is that I found the exact hair product I wanted. I won’t name names, because the next part isn’t so pretty. Sitting next to the bottle that was exactly what I wanted was this: Something that said “Angora.”
No photos here, ok? But again I have to ask, who would hurt something that looks like this:
Angora? For my hair?
I was kind to the shop owner. I asked, “does this contain real angora?” She did not know how to answer me. What if that was exactly what I was hoping was in that bottle? I heard her voice waver a bit as she said, “yes.”
She realized that split second that she had given me the wrong answer.
“So, this bottle of this other stuff I wanted…does that get tested on animals?”
Well, they were actually owed by a bigger company and the short story is yes.
No one knows I run Dalby Day. No one in that tiny shop will care if I buy this bottle of cruelty. But when I was a baby, my mom told me I used to scream when she killed a bug. Just because I won’t see the animals be treated cruelly doesn’t mean I can ignore that it happens.
I bought this instead: Rene Furtier. Vegan. Cruelty Free.
Get out there and make some tough choices, my friends. Integrity really does feel beautiful. Btw, so does my hair.
