The Politics of cosmetic consumers

Show notesThe story in this episode is composite, drawn from real events. Identifying details are changed. Real-world events the story draws on, full citations, and further reading are below.REAL-WORLD EVENTS REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODEAustraliaThe Industrial Chemicals Act 2019 (Cth) commenced on 1 July 2020, replacing the previous National Industrial Chemicals Notification and Assessment Scheme (NICNAS) with the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS). The Act includes a prohibition on the use of new animal test data for chemicals introduced solely for cosmetic use, with limited exceptions for environmental hazard assessment.The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission published its final guidance Making Environmental Claims: A Guide for Business in December 2023, naming greenwashing as an ongoing enforcement priority. The ACCC has since taken Federal Court action against several Australian and Australian-distributed brands. In April 2024 the ACCC commenced proceedings against Clorox Australia in relation to “ocean plastic” claims on GLAD-branded kitchen and garbage bags, with the Federal Court ordering a A$8.25 million penalty in 2025. In July 2025 the ACCC commenced proceedings against Edgewell Personal Care Australia in relation to “reef friendly” claims on the Hawaiian Tropic and Banana Boat sunscreen brands. Greenwashing remains a stated enforcement priority for the ACCC and ASIC in 2025-26, with cosmetics and personal care specifically named.MadagascarInvestigative reporting by the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and Terre des Hommes Netherlands, published in November 2019 as the report Child Labour in Madagascar’s Mica Sector: Impact of the Mica Supply Chain on Children’s Rights from the Malagasy Mines to the International Product Line. The report documented around twenty-two thousand workers in the mica mining and sorting sector in the southern regions of Madagascar (the Anosy and Androy areas), with around half of them children, some as young as five years old, working under unregulated conditions for wages of less than five dollars per month. The report tracked the flow of Malagasy mica into global cosmetics, electronics, and automotive supply chains predominantly via Chinese intermediaries. Madagascar has overtaken other producing countries as the world’s largest exporter of sheet mica in recent years.The cosmetics-industry response took the form of the Responsible Mica Initiative (RMI), founded in January 2017 by a coalition of cosmetics, automotive paints, and electronics companies in partnership with international NGOs. The original commitment to eliminate child labour from the natural mica supply chain by 2022 was not met. The initiative has revised its target to 2030 and operates Community Empowerment Programmes and supply chain traceability work in major producing regions.The Dutch Child Labour Due Diligence Act, passed by the Netherlands in May 2019, requires companies importing into the Netherlands to declare due diligence on child labour in their supply chains, providing a national-level regulatory framework alongside the transnational investigative work. Continuing investigative journalism through 2019-2025, including major reporting by NBC News, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, and Terre des Hommes Netherlands itself, has documented the continuing scale of child labour in Madagascar’s mica sector and the limited reach of voluntary industry response to date. France and the European Union Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 November 2009 on cosmetic products replaced the 1976 Cosmetics Directive and consolidated the testing and marketing bans on cosmetic animal testing in a single regulatory framework. The ban on testing finished cosmetic products on animals applied from 11 September 2004, the ban on testing ingredients from 11 March 2009, and the full marketing ban including the most complex human health effects from 11 March 2013, with no cosmetic product tested on animals after that date marketable in the European Union regardless of where the testing was conducted. Cruelty Free International is the contemporary continuation of an organisation founded by the Irish writer, women’s rights campaigner, suffragette, and philanthropist Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) at a public meeting in Bristol on 14 June 1898 as The British Union. The organisation was renamed the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection (BUAV) in 1949 and became Cruelty Free International on 1 June 2015. Cobbe had previously founded the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) in 1875 and was instrumental in drafting the Cruelty to Animals Act 1876 in the United Kingdom. CFI’s Leaping Bunny certification is the dominant cruelty-free mark in international cosmetics, and the organisation’s century-long campaign is thepolitical tradition behind the EU regulatory ban.International theoretical traditionNaomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, published byKnopf Canada at the end of 1999, the same week as the Seattle protestsagainst the World Trade Organization meeting that put thealter-globalisation movement on international front pages. Nowtranslated into more than thirty languages and the foundationalpolitical-economic text on the brand as the carrier of consumeridentity and political affiliation in late twentieth-centurycapitalism.Sara Ahmed’s concept of non-performativity, developed across theessay “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism” in Meridians (2006) andthe book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in InstitutionalLife (Duke University Press, 2012), based on interviews with diversityofficers in universities in the United Kingdom and Australia. Theargument is that the public statement of an institutional commitmentoften does political work as a speech act in ways that substitute forthe structural change the commitment would imply.Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor,published by Harvard University Press in 2011, drawing case studiesfrom Nigeria, Iraq, South Africa, and elsewhere in the Global South.Foundational text in postcolonial environmental humanities ondispersed, slow-moving harms that fall outside conventional accountingframeworks.REFERENCES[1] Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Toronto:Knopf Canada, 1999), with 10th anniversary edition (London: FourthEstate, 2010). Penguin Random House,https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/19089/naomi-klein(Accessed: 15 May 2026).[2] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity inInstitutional Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).Duke University Press, https://www.dukeupress.edu/on-being-included(Accessed: 15 May 2026).[3] Sara Ahmed, “The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism,” Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 7, no. 1 (2006): 104-126.[4] Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) andTerre des Hommes Netherlands, Child Labour in Madagascar’s MicaSector: Impact of the Mica Supply Chain on Children’s Rights from theMalagasy Mines to the International Product Line (Amsterdam: SOMO,November 2019), https://www.somo.nl/child-labour-in-madagascars-mica-sector/(Accessed: 15 May 2026).[5] Responsible Mica Initiative, “History,”https://responsible-mica-initiative.com/history/(Accessed: 15 May 2026); Cosmetics Design Europe, “Responsible MicaInitiative Releases First Annual Report,” 18 March 2019.[6] Terre des Hommes Netherlands, “Children Make up Half of AllWorkers in Malagasy Mica Mines, Terre des Hommes Research Reveals,”6 January 2020,https://www.terredeshommes.org/children-make-up-half-of-all-workers-in-malagasy-mica-mines-terre-des-hommes-research-reveals/(Accessed: 15 May 2026); NBC News, “Kids as Young as 4 are MiningMica in a Lawless Part of Africa,” 18 November 2019,https://www.nbcnews.com/news/all/army-children-toil-african-mica-mines-n1082916(Accessed: 15 May 2026); Wet Zorgplicht Kinderarbeid (Child LabourDue Diligence Act), Netherlands, 2019.[7] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Harvard UniversityPress, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674072343(Accessed: 15 May 2026).[8] European Parliament and Council, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 of30 November 2009 on cosmetic products, Official Journal of theEuropean Union, L 342, 22 December 2009: 59-209,https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32009R1223(Accessed: 15 May 2026); European Commission, Internal Market,Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs, “Ban on animal testing,”https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/sectors/cosmetics/ban-animal-testing_en(Accessed: 15 May 2026).[9] Cruelty Free International, “Our Heritage,”https://www.crueltyfreeinternational.org/our-work/our-heritage/(Accessed: 15 May 2026); Sally Mitchell, Frances Power Cobbe:Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer (Charlottesville: Universityof Virginia Press, 2004).[10] Industrial Chemicals Act 2019 (Cth),https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2019A00012/latest(Accessed: 15 May 2026); Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS), “Use of Animal Test Data,” https://www.industrialchemicals.gov.au/business/use-animal-test-data (Accessed: 15 May 2026).[11] Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Making Environmental Claims: A Guide for Business (Canberra: ACCC, December 2023), https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/greenwashing-guidelines.pdf (Accessed: 15 May 2026); ACCC media releases on Clorox Australia (April 2024 and 2025) and Edgewell Personal Care (July 2025); Gina Cass-Gottlieb, “ACCC’s Compliance and Enforcement Priorities 2025-26 Address,” February 2025.[12] Dara O’Rourke, Shopping for Good (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012); Sherilyn MacGregor, Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006);Michal J. Carrington, Detlev Zwick, and Benjamin A. Neville, “The Ideology of the Ethical Consumption Gap,” Marketing Theory 16, no. 1 (2016): 21-38, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470593115595674.FURTHER READINGKlein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1999. Foundational political-economic text on the brand as the carrier of consumer identity and political affiliation in late twentieth-century capitalism, and the new forms of political accountability that emerged alongside that shift.Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014. Continuation of Klein’s political- economic analysis into the climate question.Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. The book-length development of the non-performativity concept, drawn from interviews with diversity officers in UK and Australian universities. The key reading for understanding what distinguishes institutional commitment from performative positioning.Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Foundational text in postcolonial environmental humanities on dispersed, slow-moving harms that fall outside conventional accounting frameworks.Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Companion text on extractivism as a colonial-modern relation that converts territories and bodies into resources.O’Rourke, Dara. Shopping for Good. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. On the political economy of ethical consumption and the political and material conditions that shape what is available to consumers as a values-aligned purchase.MacGregor, Sherilyn. Beyond Mothering Earth: Ecological Citizenship and the Politics of Care. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006. On environmental citizenship as a political-philosophical category and its relationship to gendered care work.Mitchell, Sally. Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. The major scholarly biography of Cruelty Free International’s founder, covering her political philosophy of cross-movement social reform across animal rights, women’s rights, and anti-vivisection campaigning in nineteenth-century Britain.Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) and Terre des Hommes Netherlands. Child Labour in Madagascar’s Mica Sector. Amsterdam: SOMO, November 2019. https://www.somo.nl/child-labour-in-madagascars-mica-sector/ (Accessed: 15 May 2026). Primary source on the Malagasy mica supply chain.The Freedom Hub. Child Mica Mining. July 2021. Survey of the global political economy of mica mining, child labour, and the limits of voluntary industry response.All works, organisations, scholars, legislation, and historical events listed above are real and citable. For any source intended for formal academic or professional writing, direct verification against the original publication or institutional record is recommended.About the hostLiv Roe is a civic and political adviser based in Melbourne. She works with businesses, organisations, and individuals on the political and civic context of their work. Book a consultation at livroe.org. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit civicsandcommerce.substack.com