Animal Oils

[ennuideluxe]

I recently looked the ingredients of a bottle of carrot oil that my hair seems to quite like, and was shocked to find out it has mink oil in it!

I do eat meat once in awhile, but I find myself very uncomfortable with the idea of using animal products like this on my hair. I guess I feel that while I could absolutely justify slaughtering a chicken for meat, there's no way I could kill a mink so that I could avoid split ends, you know?

ANYWAY. There's no sense in throwing away the bottle, but I certainly wont be buying it again, and I need to look much more closely at ingredients.

I know mink and emu oils both come from animals, but are there any others that I need to look out for?

[lastnite]

I see alot of the ethnic hair care products do have mink oil in it, I always check. I'm with you; I can never feel comfortable slaughtering animals just for hair or fur fashions (is probably what the mink was originally used for). Although a bone/horn comb made from an animal that was killed for food is ok with me.

I can't really think of any other oils - emu, mink; and shark, whale, and turtle come to mind but I don't think they are in that many products here in the US (and might go by different names to hide what they are).

[ennuideluxe]

Shark, whale and turtle too? Wow. I would have never guessed.

I think I'll do some research into this, just in case they are indeed hiding under different names. Funny enough, if they had used the Latin name for mink, I wouldn't have thought twice about it. Now I know.

Thanks!

[shellblue1]

There are two oils that sound similar in name - one type is made from sharks and the other type is made from olives. It's called squalane - also called squalene.

"squalane was originally obtained from shark livers and sometimes it still is. The fish-friendly alternative is squalane made from olives."
http://truthinaging.com/ingredient-spotlight/what-is-it-squalane

I've used olive squalane to add moisture to my hair lightener before and it seemed to worked well.

[Copasetic]

I saw a deep conditioner the other day that had mink oil in it. I was kind of surprised by it. I had no idea that mink oil was used cosmetically. The only other time I have seen an animal oil for cosmetic purposes is emu oil.

I'm not going to lie, I was tempted to try the mink oil conditioner, but the more I thought about it, the more it kind of grossed me out.

[MandyBeth]

Lanolin is from sheep. Thier wool, but from the sheep none the less. With emu oil, the rest of the bird is used, so it's fine to me.

[Sookie]

Lanolin gives hair elasticity!
Wow i didn't know those kind of oils existed haha! I wanna try them !!

[Nastasia]

I don't see the problem with lanolin. It's extracted from the wool when the sheep are shorn. It's not like they're killed for it.