Cult Beauty Bans Badger Hair After PETA Exposé

For Immediate Release:

27 November 2019

Contact:

Sascha Camilli +44 (0) 20 7923 6244; [email protected]

CULT BEAUTY BANS BADGER HAIR AFTER PETA EXPOSÉ

More Than 90 Brands Now Reject the Violent Killing of Badgers for Make-Up Brushes

London – After PETA shared a horrifying video exposé of China’s badger-brush industry with Cult Beauty, the high-end cosmetics retailer has banned the sale of badger-hair make-up brushes.

“I’ve spoken to the team about this and agree that [badger hair] should be taken off the site,” says Cult Beauty CEO and co-founder Alexia Inge. “We have removed this from the site and will not be restocking [it].”

“No make-up brush is worth tormenting and killing a sensitive wild animal,” says PETA Director Elisa Allen. “By banning the sale of badger-hair brushes on its hugely influential platform, Cult Beauty is helping PETA push the cosmetics industry in a kinder direction.”

PETA Asia’s investigation revealed that in order to produce make-up, paint, and shaving brushes, badgers are captured using snares and other cruel methods while others are bred and confined to cramped wire cages on farms before being violently killed. On Chinese badger-hair farms, many animals exhibit behaviour patterns indicative of a severe psychological disorder, and on one farm, a badger was missing a leg. Abattoir workers beat screaming animals over the head with anything that they could find, including a chair leg, before slitting their throats. One animal continued to move for a full minute after his throat had been cut.

PETA – whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. The group notes that badgers are extremely social animals who, in nature, construct elaborate underground burrow systems, some of which are centuries old and have been inhabited by many generations of the same badger clan. They are fastidious and have separate rooms for sleeping and giving birth as well as designated outside “bathroom” areas.

Procter & Gamble, the parent company of The Art of Shaving, was the first company to ban badger-hair items after the release of PETA Asia’s video, and more than 90 others have followed suit, including Morphe, NARS Cosmetics, Penhaligon’s, and Floris London.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.uk.

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