While it's usually easy to avoid obvious animal ingredients like bovine gelatine and lactose, many products contain less familiar ingredients like cochineal (small squashed bugs), whey (a dairy protein) and calcium propionate (usually ground up bones!) It gets even more confusing when you learn that many innocuous sounding E-numbers are in fact unlisted animal ingredients (E270 is lactic acid, which is often animal-derived, for example).

Never fear though, because we've come up with comprehensive, printable, savable-as-PDF lists for animal-derived ingredients and for E-numbers. Choose one of these options from the menu on the left and, when the lists load, you'll notice a set of 3 icons to the right of the titles - these are Print, PDF and Email buttons that do exactly what they say :-)

We hope you find this guide useful - if we've left anything off, or have made a claim you know to be false, please let us know. We want this guide to be as accurate as possible!

PS: We're working on some other lists too....Expect a vegan alcohol list soon!

PPS: If it's a more general cruelty free beauty, food or clothing product list you're after, click on the Shopping Guide menu item on the left and then choose one of the sub-links that appears.