Most manufacturers who contact us assume VegeCert certifies food. It’s an understandable assumption — it’s where we started in 2012, and it’s still the bulk of what we do.
But personal care has quietly become one of the more interesting parts of our work, and one of the harder ones. Sunscreen, skincare, and cosmetics carry animal-derived ingredients that almost never appear in a food formulation, and the supply chains behind them disclose far less by default.
Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
The ingredients that catch personal care formulators
In food, the animal-derived ingredients that surprise people are mostly processing aids — filtering agents, clarifiers, enzymes. In personal care, they’re often structural. They’re doing real work in the formulation, and swapping them out changes how the product performs.
The recurring ones:
Beeswax and other bee products. Common in balms, sticks, and anhydrous formulations. Propolis and royal jelly show up in premium skincare.
Lanolin. Derived from wool. Still widespread in barrier creams and lip products, and frequently listed under derivative names that don’t read as animal-sourced.
Squalene. Historically from shark liver oil. Plant-derived squalane from olive or sugarcane is now common, but the two names differ by one letter and the sourcing has to be confirmed rather than assumed.
Carmine. An insect-derived red pigment. Disqualifying for vegan, and also disqualifying for vegetarian under our standard, since our vegetarian designation excludes insects.
Collagen, elastin, keratin, and silk protein. Marketed heavily in anti-ageing and haircare. Almost always animal-derived unless specifically sourced otherwise.
Stearic acid, cetyl alcohol, and emulsifying waxes. These are the quiet ones. All three can be plant-derived or animal-derived, and the INCI name is identical either way. Nothing on the label tells you which you have. This is where most personal care reviews slow down.
Glycerine. The same problem as in food, and just as common.
Why the supply chain is harder here
Food manufacturers are used to being asked for sub-ingredient breakdowns. It’s a normal part of allergen management, and most have the documentation on hand.
Personal care suppliers often don’t work that way. A cosmetic ingredient supplier may treat sourcing as proprietary, or genuinely not know — a surfactant blended three tiers up the chain can contain an animal-derived component that nobody downstream has ever asked about.
That’s not an obstacle to certification. It just means supplier declarations take longer to collect, and the ones that come back vague have to go back out again. Manufacturers who start requesting sourcing letters before they apply save themselves weeks.
Contract manufacturing and private label
A significant share of personal care is made by contract manufacturers producing under other companies’ brands. That raises a question we get often: who holds the certification?
The manufacturer does, at the formulation level. But certification covers a specific formulation from specific suppliers — so if a private label client requests a variation, a different fragrance, or a substituted emulsifier, that variant needs review before it can carry the mark.
The practical implication for contract manufacturers: build the certification check into your new-product intake process rather than treating it as an afterthought. It’s much cheaper to confirm an ingredient is acceptable before a client signs off on a formulation than after.
Certification stacks
Personal care manufacturers rarely hold one certification. They hold several, and the marks do different jobs.
VeganicSKN, an Australian manufacturer of organic mineral sunscreen, lists VegeCert alongside NSF/ANSI 305 organic certification, PETA’s cruelty-free listing, and Australian Made — with TGA regulatory approval underneath all of it, since sunscreen is a therapeutic good in Australia rather than a cosmetic.
That stack is worth understanding, because each mark answers a different question:
- Organic speaks to how ingredients were farmed.
- Cruelty-free speaks to animal testing.
- Vegan speaks to whether animal-derived material is in the product at all.
None of them substitutes for the others. A cruelty-free product can contain beeswax. An organic product can contain lanolin. This is the single most common misconception we encounter in personal care, and it’s why brands carrying three marks still need the fourth.
What we assess
The review is structurally the same as for food:
- Full ingredient and sub-ingredient breakdown, at INCI level
- Supplier declarations for anything ambiguous — glycerine, stearic acid, cetyl alcohol, emulsifiers, fragrance components
- Sanitation and changeover procedures for shared equipment
- Rework and carryover policy
- Facility layout, where relevant
The one meaningful difference: fragrance and colour components need more scrutiny than they do in food, because they’re more likely to be proprietary blends and more likely to contain animal-derived material without saying so.
The short version
If you make skincare, cosmetics, supplements, or sunscreen, vegan certification is available to you, and the process is the same one food manufacturers go through. The ingredient risks are different, the supply chain is less transparent, and the documentation takes a little longer to assemble.
None of that is disqualifying. It just means starting the paperwork earlier.
Make personal care products? Tell us what you formulate and we’ll tell you what certification would involve — before you commit to anything.
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