VBites founder and longtime vegan and animal rights activist Heather Mills took to Instagram today to share news with her followers that she’s working on launching the “world’s first truly vegan international cosmetics range.”
While a number of vegan skincare and cruelty-free cosmetics brands currently exist on the market, Mills’ announcement points to cosmetics ingredients that are likely to have been tested on animals at some point in order to garner regulatory approval. So, while a brand may not test its current products on animals, and the ingredients they source may no longer technically be tested on animals either, a number of companies positioned as vegan or cruelty-free may be using ingredients that have gone through that process at some point in their history.
Mills said in the video that her new beauty brand will be the first internationally commercial vegan cosmetic range that’s “truly, truly vegan” and will work as well as conventional cosmetics, “especially when you get to be my age,” the 50-year-old says.
The former model didn’t detail the brand name, where the cosmetics range would be landing, or when, but she did offer up that it would be an international range. Mills reportedly met with the Department of Industry and Trade to help secure distribution for the line.
Mills launched VBites in 1993; the vegan meat producer has its products placed in 25 countries with only a small U.S. presence currently. But that may also be changing soon as Mills said in the video she’s carting around a bag of vegan burgers, fish sticks, and duck — presumably VBites samples — from one meeting to the next in New York City.
The brand recently took over a former Kellogg factory in England to boost production.
Mills credits her shift to a vegan diet after losing her leg in a motorcycle accident when she was 25.
“I had infections which kept spreading up it, I was on antibiotics and spent months in hospital,” she said in a recent interview. “And then my friend said ‘You have to go vegan if you’re going to get out of this hospital. Literally, in 10 days my whole leg healed, so it saved my knee.”
