World’s leading beauty retailer takes action to prevent minks from being caged, killed, and skinned
Following a PETA campaign and e-mails from more than 280,000 concerned shoppers, Sephora has confirmed that it has banned mink-fur eyelashes and will purchase only synthetic or faux-fur lashes going forward. To thank the company, PETA US is sending it a box of delicious vegan chocolates.
“There’s no difference between a mink coat and mink eyelashes when it comes to animal suffering,” says PETA Director Elisa Allen. “PETA is celebrating Sephora’s decision to join Too Faced, Urban Decay, and the scores of other brands that realise there’s nothing beautiful about stealing an animal’s fur.”
Mink fur typically comes from fur farms, where stressed minks frantically pace and circle endlessly inside cramped wire cages and many suffer from infections or broken or malformed limbs. Some minks even self-mutilate as a result of the intensive confinement, gnawing on their own legs or tails. At the end of their miserable lives, they’re gassed or electrocuted or their necks are broken. Despite this, Sephora marketed mink eyelashes as “cruelty-free”.
PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to wear” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview – is calling on Velour and Lilly Lashes, two brands that previously supplied Sephora with mink eyelashes, to go fur-free.