here at adwoa beauty, we pride ourselves on not only our transparency, but also our ethical concerns.

a question we tend to get about our hair products, is regarding the claim that they contain vegan ingredients. so to clarify, the simple answer is yes, all of our products with the exception of our baomint ™ curl defining cream are vegan! the more complex answer? okay, yes, the cream is excluded but it may depend on your own personal principals if you consider yourself to be steadfast vegan! why? well, because there’s one ingredient in the cream that eliminates it from being included in the category. honey! that’s right. it’s time to talk about the birds and the bees. now this is something of a point of contention among many in the “vegan community”. there are vegetarians that choose to simply not eat meat because of the obvious ethical concerns about the well being of the animal that it comes from. but moreover, there are others; vegans, that take it a meaningful step beyond and go as far as to abstain from any products/goods that comes from an animal at all. this would include products such as milk, eggs, gelatin, and for many, in this case, honey. this though, is where the discrepancies come into play.

is honey absolutely something that falls outside the vegan diet? believe it or not, there are a demographic of people for whom being vegan, and perhaps
indulging in an occasional bowl of cheerios aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive! this is because on a technical level, the idea of whether the honey comes directly from the bee or not all comes down to semantics. let's cut to the chase, is the honey something that the bee itself expels? well, yes, absolutely! however it’s not something that can be compared to say, milk.

as where you can see that the milk is something that the cow produces, the key here is that the animal itself is the source. honey on the other hand, comes from a source outside of the bee. forager bees extract the nectar from flowers of one or sometimes multiple different types (fun fact: this actually causes the flavors to vary) though, wholly plant based, nectar is ingested by the bee, stored in a special stomach specifically for holding it, and chemically broken down to be dehydrated and regurgitated later. within this context, depending on how you look at it, you might actually be able to regard the bee as simply a carrier. with all this considered, would you classify honey as a plant-based good, or an animal-based good?

let us know! we’d love to hear what you guys think.

james debbah