Tag: Vegan

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Daily Harvest Review 2020: Vegan Meal Kit Review


I follow the kind of diet that would make your mom (and doctors) cringe. I’m what some might call “peckish” and—if you haven’t noticed—chips, cookies, and candy come in bite-sized, bird-friendly portions. My palette is also extreme in that food must be either a) bland, or b) how you think the word neon would taste. It’s probably because I’ve eaten so many Hot Cheetos, Hot Cheetos Limón, and Chester’s Hot Fries that my tastebuds are essentially burned off my tongue. That, and the fact that I’ve been drinking black coffee since high school.

Suffice it to say I am not the picture of health. When I do peel my hands away from the nearest chip bag and eat ‘adult’ food, I opt for generally healthy options. I’m basically a raccoon: often eating garbage, but sometimes that garbage is raw vegetables. Still, a healthy meal or snack here and there doesn’t make up for my lack of eating whole foods on the regular. So I decided to try a meal kit service to hopefully improve my habits and make sure that I am, in fact, eating protein and not subsisting on a permanent caffeine or sugar high. Enter: Daily Harvest.

So, what exactly is Daily Harvest?

The fro-yo shop of healthy meal kits. Daily Harvest sends ready-to-blend smoothies and bowls in pre-frozen cups. Everything comes pre-portioned and all you have to do is throw the food in a blender, microwave, or pan before eating. Like a good millennial, I was drawn to Daily Harvest because of its branding. The brightly colored smoothies looked like candy masquerading as protein shakes, and since moving to the East Coast from Los Angeles, finding ripe, non-bruised fruit has been hard to come by.

Is Daily Harvest organic?

Yes, 95%. Anything organic is marked on the back of the cups.

Is Daily Harvest vegan?

It’s complicated. Daily Harvest isn’t exactly a vegan meal delivery service—even though its recipes are built on fruits and vegetables. That’s because you add whatever kind of liquid you like to the cups (oat milk was my preference, but you can add whole milk, water, hemp milk, etc.) and because of the customization, the brand likes to call its recipes “plant-based and vegan-friendly.” Everything comes free of gluten, dairy, fillers, preservatives, refined sugars, and artificial anything—but what you do with it after that is up to you.

So, how good is the actual food? (a.k.a. my Daily Harvest meals review)

I opted for nine cups (the lowest number) on a weekly basis, because small Brooklyn apartments come with small Brooklyn freezers. In total, I tested Daily Harvest over a three-week period and tried a cup from each of its categories—smoothies, bowls, lattes, bites, and soups.

Strawberry + Peach Smoothie

Pro tip: Match your smoothie to your sweater.

Shanna Shipin



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Beyoncé Is Offering a Lifetime Supply of Tickets If You Go Vegan, and People Are Losing It


Beyoncé just gave everyone a huge incentive to eat lettuce. The music queen took to Instagram on Wednesday night (January 30) and revealed she’s offering the chance to win free tickets to her concerts for life if you go vegan. Yup, that’s right: If you want to see Bey from now until the end of time (eh?), all you have to do is give up meat. And dairy. And all the other delicious foods vegans don’t eat. But there’s a silver lining, people: Beyoncé. For. Life.

The giveaway is happening through The Greenprint Project, which is dedicated to showing you how eating just one plant-based meal a day can help the environment. “What is your Greenprint? Click the link in my bio for a chance to win tickets to any JAY and/or my shows for life,” Beyoncé wrote on Instagram, linking to the sweepstakes.

In all seriousness, there’s no logical way Greenprint can actually check to see if you’re vegan should you win this contest—but that’s not stopping people from metaphorically throwing out all the meat in their freezers. When Beyoncé wants something, you just do it. I don’t make up the rules.

Check out a few folks prepared to give up all the cheese for Queen B:

Beyoncé’s partnership with this project shouldn’t come as a surprise. After several buzzy teasers, she infamously “revealed” on Good Morning America in 2015 that she’d adopted a vegan lifestyle.

“This is something I have to share with everyone,” she said at the time. “I am not naturally the thinnest woman. I have curves. I’m proud of my curves, and I have struggled since a young age with diets. And finding something that actually works, that actually keeps the weight off, has been difficult for me…. I felt like my skin was really firm, a lot tighter than when I deprived myself of food and got the weight off fast. And the weight stayed off.”



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This Vegan CC Cream Comes in a Shade Darker Than Fenty’s Foundations


On the surface level CC creams appear to be the perfect product. Formulated with the distinctive property of targeting discoloration, color corrective creams offer the all-in-one sunscreen, primer, moisturizer, and foundation power of a BB cream with the bonus of evening skin tone and fading hyperpigmentation. But where the product category falls notoriously short is in inclusivity. It isn’t rare for brands to bring creams to the market in fewer than five shade offerings, typically in broad classifications like light, light-medium, and medium only.

For Karissa Bodnar, founder and CEO of the buzzy philanthropic brand Thrive Causemetics, the alienation of so many consumers of color was unacceptable, so she decided to do something about it. The result? An 18-shade Buildable CC cream collection with its darkest shade ringing in as one of the darkest available on the market—darker than even the deepest foundation shade from Fenty Beauty, which has come to serve as the standard for what an inclusivity like looks like.

Recently launched on the brand’s website, the new CC cream is oil-, vegan-, paraben-, and sulfate-free, and it’s even formulated with “smart” micro-pigments that adjust to your skin tone. Shades are divided between four categories—light, medium, rich, and deep—with four to five shade options in each category.

“Most CC creams have high levels of zinc and titanium dioxide to make up their SPF, which in their raw state are pure white,” says Bodnar. “That’s what makes it impossible for these other brands to achieve the darker shades.”

It took three full years of development with scientists, dermatologists, and ophthalmologists to work around the scientific limitations. The result? They created an unprecedented process that adds color to the zinc and titanium dioxide to not only accommodate an inclusive range of tones, but to ensure that the cream wouldn’t leave a white cast on skin. The process also makes the formula HD, which means no camera flashback. It’s a win/win all around.

Even more impressively, to make sure the ambitious 18-shade range was truly inclusive, Bodnar and her team worked with women of color on the formulation, including Essence magazine editors, brand tycoon and influencer Bozoma Saint John, and actress Priyanka Chopra, as well as customers from its Thrive Lab, a community that gives input and tests new products for the brand before they officially roll out. The hard work paid off—when the creams debuted, half of the shades sold out in less than 48 hours, with a significant portion being on the darker end of the range.

“I’m so proud that we’ve been able to create shades that are truly inclusive. It’s so amazing to hear from women who have never been able to wear a CC cream before,” Bodnar says of the women who thank her and the brand on social media daily. “It makes me emotional because I come from a place of privilege; as a Caucasian women I’ve never gone into a store and thought: I can’t use this makeup. So the fact that any woman would ever feel like she can’t use one of our products because of her skin tone makes me so determined to include them. To hear the feedback from women of color, whether they’re Indian or African-American, it’s amazing.”

But why is three-year-old Thrive Causemetics the first beauty brand to find its way around the exclusive science? Bodnar met the question with a deep sigh over a phone call.

“I wish I had a clear answer,” she says. “First it makes me sad. Then it makes me mad. Then it just makes me really determined to create something that is inclusive.” She went to explain that the zinc and titanium dioxide needed in the formula is tricky to work around, noting that Thrive Causemetics had to literally re-invented how to create a CC cream with their process. “I don’t think that’s an excuse though, I want to be really clear about that. You have to keep going until you create a product that is inclusive.”

Let’s hope other brands are out there taking notes, ready and willing to follow suit sooner than later. Women of color deserve that much.

Related Stories:
–The Best Place to Find All-Natural Black-Owned Beauty Products
–8 Women of Color on Their Go-To Products for Hyperpigmentation
–Makeup for Melanin Girls Isn’t Just Making Products for Women of Color. It’s Listening to Them.





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Hourglass Cosmetics Is Going Completely Vegan


If you want makeup that’s going to look as good on your Instagram as it does on your face, Hourglass Cosmetics is a first stop. Between its OG marbled, impossible-to-mess-up powders, its velvet-finish foundation stick, and the primer that convinces people primers are worthwhile, the brand has always been a solid choice when you want to invest. The twist? A hefty amount of the brand’s products are already vegan, and it’s making going fully cruelty-free a priority. To celebrate World Vegan Day (today), the brand just announced that by 2020, every single one of its products will be entirely vegan.

What does this mean for your favorite formulas? Similar to a vegan diet, anything that’s an animal bi-product is off the table. So for beauty brands, that means eliminating the use of common ingredients like beeswax (often used in lip balms) and Carmine, a dye made from beetles’ wings. (Yes, that’s a common additive, look on the back of your makeup packaging for CI 75470 to find out if your favorite brands are using it.)

But since a handful of Hourglass’s classics are already vegan, it likely means only a few products will be getting an update. We did some digging, and the following products aren’t listed as vegan, so they’ll likely be up for reformulation: the Femme Rouge Velvet Crème Lipstick, Girl Lip Stylo, Ambient Strobe Lighting Powder, Ambient Strobe Lighting Blush, Panoramic Long Wear Lip Liner, Hidden Corrective Concealer, Film Noir Full Spectrum Mascara, Modernist Eyeshadow Palette, and Gel Eye Liners. That said, it’s pretty safe to assume the brand’s not going release anything less than the quality it’s known for, so the vegan replacements will surely be just as good.

On top of that news, in a second twist, the brand is dipping its toe in vegan and cruelty-free fashion. Its celebrating its commitment with a vegan leather makeup clutch, and 100 percent of its profits will go to the Nonhuman Rights Project. We can’t say we saw this coming, but it’s actually incredibly chic (right in line with the Hourglass brand). Not mad about it.

Related Stories:
–28 Cruelty-Free Beauty Brands You Need to Know
–Kat Von D Beauty Is Going Completely Vegan
–Orly’s New Nail Polish Collab With ‘Muslim Girl’ Is Completely Halal-Friendly



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