Shampoo?

So last night I'm washing my hair in the shower, and I suddenly wonder, "Can shampoo be non-vegan? What about this hotel soap?" When a Google search on "vegan shampoo" turns up a page full of hits of people asking each other where they can buy an inexpensive vegan shampoo, I conclude the answer is yes.

So what about mine? It's Garnier Fructis. I can't read the ingredients because it's a mini travel bottle that has been used and refilled many times, so the writing has worn off. But the issue is not the ingredients. To a real vegan, not the "for a week" variety, it's not just the contents of the product you use, but the whole process of how it got there. Products that are tested on animals are not vegan. According to the Garnier company website, they "rigorously lab-test all our new product propositions."  But does that lab involve animals?

A thread on a bulletin board starts with saying they, or at least the parent L'Oreal, used to do animal testing but don't any more, then says maybe they still have the suppliers test the ingredients, and ends with someone saying Garnier says they don't test on animals. The UK group Uncaged (which is just asking for a parody called Unhinged) has Garnier on their boycott list. Every second answer on every website dealing with the question contradicts the previous one. Can you imagine having to do this research for every product that you ever used?  And what if Company A extensively tests a set of ingredients on animals, determining them safe for human use, then Company B makes a product out of the same ingredients and just trusts Company A's test results? And then along comes Company C and makes a product out of different, untested ingredients and it turns out to cause tear duct cysts, or whatever it is they are testing for. My husband used to think that "Not Tested on Animals" was a government-mandated warning label for possibly harmful products.

I really don't care a lot about what kind of shampoo I use, so if there were a clearcut answer to whether any particular product were or were not tested on animals, I could be convinced to use a untested product. But I'd like it to be made from ingredients that had been in use for a long time and were known to be safe--probably because once upon a time they HAD been tested on animals.

For what it's worth, I support the use of Nazi scientific findings to help modern scientists. And maybe I've just found out why hippies traditionally have filthy hair.