NARS Bans Badger Hair After PETA Exposé
Nearly 90 Brands Now Reject the Violent Killing of Badgers for Makeup Brushes
For Immediate Release:
October 25, 2019
Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7282
After PETA shared a horrifying video exposé of China’s badger-brush industry with NARS Cosmetics, the high-end cosmetics company banned the sale of badger-hair makeup brushes. In thanks, PETA sent it a box of delicious vegan chocolates.
“No makeup brush is worth tormenting and killing a sensitive wild animal,” says PETA Senior Director of Corporate Affairs Anne Brainard. “By banning the sale of badger-hair brushes, NARS is helping PETA push the cosmetics industry in a kinder direction.”
PETA Asia’s investigation revealed that in order to make makeup, paint, and shaving brushes, badgers are captured using snares and other cruel methods while others are bred and confined to small wire cages on farms before being violently killed. On Chinese badger-hair farms, many animals exhibit behavior patterns indicative of a severe psychological disorder, and on one farm, a badger was missing a leg. Slaughterhouse workers beat screaming badgers 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.
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 nearly 90 others have followed suit, including Morphe, The New York Shaving Company, Beau Brummell, and Bonanza. PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way,” and which opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview—is now calling on Blick Art Materials to do the same.
For more information, please visit PETA.org.
