Lush launches inaugural Lush Prize
Offers £250,000 prize money for breakthrough in cruelty free research
Lush Cosmetics has announced that the inaugural Lush Prize is now open for nominations. It is hoped the new award, a collaboration between Lush and Ethical Consumer, will support and encourage initiatives in the field of non-animal testing.
In an ordinary year, says Lush, the £250,000 annual award will be broken down into five smaller awards for outstanding contributions in five sectors: the Science Prize, Training Prize, Lobbying Prize, Public Awareness Prize and Young Researcher Awards (to five postgraduates specialising in alternatives research). However, the whole £250,000 will be available to one winner in any one year in which a key breakthrough event occurs.
Lush founders Mark Constantine and Helen Ambrosen introduced the Lush Prize to coincide exactly with the 21st anniversary of the brand’s policy promising that there would be no animal testing of either its products or ingredients. In the intervening years, Lush has worked with its suppliers to stop the use of any animals for any of their safety testing.
“Sadly animal testing for the cosmetics industry is still widespread,” said Constantine, who noted that both globalisation and the REACH legislation had inhibited the progress of the cause. “In 21 years a lot has changed but still much of the cosmetic industry cannot guarantee safe cosmetics tested without the involvement of animals. So here at Lush we are trying another tack. Today we are launching a prize worth a quarter of a million pounds and we hope to fund the Eureka moment – when a breakthrough is made to end animal testing of cosmetics forever.”
Hilary Jones, ethics director at Lush added: “The Lush Prize is a change of direction for us. We’re very good at highlighting what we don’t like… but with the Lush Prize we have the chance to reward good behaviour. We thought, let’s focus the attention of our customers, staff, windows and money on progressing what should be happening.”
Open nominations for the various prizes will be invited with nominations closing 1 September. Following this, a panel of ten independent judges including Andrew Tyler (director of Animal Aid) Troy Seidle (director of research & toxicology for Humane Society International) and Caroline Lucas MP (leader of the UK’s Green Party) will decide on the winners who will be announced at a ceremony held on 15 November 2012.
For more information visit www.lushprize.org.