Q. Are all vegan cosmetics natural? I want to avoid animal products but also don't want products made with synthetic chemicals.

A. It’s a very confusing area because somehow we all believe that vegan must mean natural. But the short answer to your question is No. Some are. Some aren’t.

This is where we need to define some terms. To start with, the difference between vegetarian and vegan: vegetarian cosmetics do not contain ingredients that were part of an animal but may contain ingredients that were made by an animal, e.g. honey, beeswax, albumen from egg whites, milk substances etc.

Strictly vegan products exclude any ingredient directly or indirectly sourced from an animal, living or dead. This includes, for example, beeswax, honey, shellac, animal hair and lanolin, also less recognisable ingredients such as keratin, stearic acid, tallow, guanine, squalene, lactoferrin, hydrolysed silk and the colouring agent carmine. (The process of obtaining these ingredients doesn't, we would emphasise, necessarily imply any cruelty to the animals.) The website ethicalelephant.com has several useful lists to guide consumers.

There is added confusion because some ingredients can be sourced from animals or plants, or made synthetically. Squalene, for example, can be derived from sharks or olive oil. Stearic acid may be obtained from coconut and not from dead animals.

To be certain a product is vegan, the simplest guarantee is to choose products with Vegan Society certification. Maleka Dattu, founder of Merumaya skincare (and a long time beauty industry leader), says the process of gaining that certification is ‘long and arduous. They are beyond rigorous and rightly so! They delve into every single ingredient from every single manufacturer.’ The examiners look not just at the ingredients and their processing but also the machinery used to make them, she adds.

However, this does not mean the ingredients in products are totally natural - a term by the way that has no regulatory status at all. As we have pointed out for decades, many products claim to be natural when the reality their only ‘naturalness’ is that they contain a few plant extracts.

Synthetic chemical ingredients are more likely to be vegan – and also more affordable. One leading ‘beauty steal’ brand of vegan mascara contains a load of synthetics including ‘Synthetic Beeswax’. See? So it’s vegan but not natural.

On the bright side, there is hugely more choice now in the vegan beauty market. A blog on The Vegan Society website compares the situation 20 years ago – ‘small make up collections, old-fashioned colours and chalky formulations’ – with today when, says the blogger Marie Hamm, ‘vegan beauties are spoilt for choice’. And, as she makes clear, there are truly natural vegan brands such as Inika, an Australian certified organic make up brand that ticks all the boxes, including being cruelty-free. Inika offers a range of wonderful products that have won several Beauty Bible Awards.

We also highly recommend Tropic natural make up and skincare, which now offers hair products too. This British brand was started by Australian (again) Susie Ma and many of the formulations were inspired by the plants and pharmacology she grew up with. The products are also gluten- and alcohol-free, fair trade and don't contain palm oil. (We’re off soon to visit Tropic’s Surrey HQ, which has created a natural sustainable paradise on an industrial estate.)

Tropic has a bunch of ‘proud’ certifications, including vegan and carbon neutral, plus Leaping Bunny and ‘crueltyfree andvegan’ that’s PETA’s Beauty Without Bunnies promise. Plus, Tropic has also won Beauty Bible Awards.

As animal lovers, we are delighted that many make up lines such as Kat Von D Beauty are reformulating to be vegan and natural. If animal welfare is top of your list, visit the website for PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) at peta.org, and choose PETA-certified products. Their Beauty Without Bunnies logo has now been extended from ‘cruelty-free’ to ‘crueltyfree andvegan’. The logo’s displayed here.

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