Est. 2009
Our Story
From a small vegan lifestyle blog to a trusted editorial voice in cruelty-free beauty. We have been proving that ethical beauty is not a compromise — it is a choice that delivers real results.
From a small vegan lifestyle blog to a trusted editorial voice in cruelty-free beauty. We have been proving that ethical beauty is not a compromise — it is a choice that delivers real results.
In 2009, checking whether a mascara was cruelty-free meant emailing the brand and waiting two weeks for a reply written by a lawyer. The phrase "vegan beauty" barely existed, and the few products that qualified mostly performed like craft supplies. Beautiful Vegan started as a record of that frustration.
The site began as a scrappy personal blog — vegan recipes, lifestyle posts, the occasional rant about beeswax hiding in lip balm. Over the years it narrowed into the thing readers kept coming back for: testing products properly, explaining ingredients honestly, and giving straight answers about which brands deserve your money.
We believe beauty should not come at a cost to animals. But we also believe ethical products have to perform — nobody keeps buying a moisturizer out of principle. Every review on this site answers one question first: does this actually work?
Every product we cover goes through the same process: a minimum of 4 weeks of daily use, multiple skin types, an ingredient audit, and a check on the parent company's animal testing policy. We wrote the whole process down on our How We Test page — including how ratings are scored and what we do with PR samples.
Independence and transparency guide everything we publish.
No parent company, no investors, no corporate agenda. Our recommendations are driven by testing results, not affiliate commission rates.
We disclose every affiliate relationship and clearly label sponsored content. Our affiliate disclosure appears on every page that contains affiliate links.
Nothing gets a rating that has not been used for at least four weeks by real people with real skin. No rewritten press releases, no reviews of products we have never opened.
Our content is reviewed for accuracy by team members with backgrounds in cosmetic chemistry and dermatology research.
Over 15 years of expertise in vegan and cruelty-free beauty. We have watched the industry evolve from niche to mainstream.
We listen to our readers. Product suggestions, brand investigations, and topic requests shape our editorial calendar.
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
Casey went vegan in 2008 and spent the next year discovering that her entire makeup bag disagreed with her ethics. The final straw was an hour spent in a drugstore aisle googling whether carmine — the red pigment in her favorite lipstick — was really made from crushed beetles. (It is.) She started Beautiful Vegan in 2009 so nobody else would have to do that research from scratch.
Seventeen years and several hundred empties later, she still tests every product the same way: on her own stubbornly combination skin, for a month minimum, with a spreadsheet. When she is not decoding ingredient lists, she is usually fostering rescue cats — the only animal testing this site will ever allow.
One email a week: what we tested, what surprised us, and the one product actually worth your money. No spam, no fluff.