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Vegan skin is not made of animals – a victory for vegans and those who are concerned about animal cruelty in the fashion industry. It also avoids some of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with livestock farming.
And while conventional skin often needs to be treated with hazardous chemicals such as formaldehyde, vegan skin does not require a preservative.
Instead, vegan skin mimics some of the skin’s positive qualities – durability, breathability, flexibility, wrinkle resistance – using materials other than animal skin. So what are these? What does the letter “P” mean in scandalous skin?
More often than not, vegan skin is made of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or polyurethane (PU). “In other words,” says Prieti Gopinath, a textile designer and associate professor at Parsons’ School of Fashion, “it’s plastic.”
And as we all already know, plastics derived from fossil fuels come with a number of environmental concerns. They are energy-intensive to produce, difficult to dispose of responsibly and tend to stay in the environment for a long, long time. From this point of view, vegan leather is not the most durable material.
Part of what makes it so difficult to create a really Sustainable vegan skin – oil-free and biodegradable – is that chemicals are needed to achieve many of the skin’s impressive qualities. As Gopinat points out, biodegradable fabrics are designed to break down in the sun, wind and water, but we want our leather alternatives to withstand all of these elements when we use them.
“We want the material to do too many things,” she says. “We ask it to be biodegradable and resistant to water and sun. If it has to withstand all this, it will obviously not be biodegradable.”
At the end of the day, sustainable stylist Cassandra Dietmer agrees that comparing vegan skin to animal skin is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. They are different and one is not inherently better than the other in terms of the environment.
Which one you choose will require you to weigh the pros and cons and then decide which qualities you value the most.
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