First: it isn't possible to stay 100% safe by only buying from big box stores or department stores. Big corporations do dumb things too. Some of them do extremely dumb things. Some even do harmful things knowingly, because someone somewhere buries paperwork or blurs statistics because selling Product X is still a good business decision and the chance of it causing a severe health problem for a large number of consumers is small...so the payoff far outweighs the risks. At least in their mind (or what passes for it.)

Just because a company is large doesn't mean that it sells products that are safe, let alone merely "not unsafe".

Just because a company is small doesn't mean that it won't do proper diligence, sell safe products, and give proper information to customers.

Second: it isn't possible to avoid buying products that harm the environment, or products that are sourced from companies that test on animals, or products that are manufactured as ecologically sound as possible, by buying from small companies or "indie" companies. Sure, you may know that the end-vendor recycles all their office paper, doesn't use harsh chemicals, doesn't perform animal testing, what have you. But generally, the end-vendor you're buying stuff from did not create the raw materials and source every ingredient every step of the way. They bought ingredients from wholesalers or labs - a bit like a bakery buying flour in bulk rather than growing, harvesting, and grinding wheat to get flour. If you buy makeup from someone like Shiro Cosmetics (whose products I use and love), you know that Caitlin doesn't add preservatives to her makeup and tries to use only ingredients that will let a product be labeled "vegan", and she's very good about labelling which items are not vegan (actually, as of March 2, she labels every color in her store: this is vegan, or this is not vegan.) But Caitlin didn't go dig up the pigments on her own, she bought them from a wholesaler. She didn't go get the mica herself, that's actually created in a lab - and again, she probably buys that from a wholesaler. That wholesaler may or may not be the manufacturer of those items. And the company that synthesizes or mines or creates the items (wax, mica, titanium dioxide, et cetera) may or may not perform animal testing. And they may or may not engage in fair-trade practices. And they may or may not recycle all their office paper. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Buying from a company that says that they follow X practices doesn't guarantee that the product is cruelty-free, harsh-chemical-free, fair-trade, what have you. You can buy from companies that follow X or Y practice, but that still leaves the wholesalers and manufacturers of raw ingredients to do the testing, use harsh chemicals, tries to bust employee unions, et cetera. That doesn't mean that you should give up and just buy from anyone. But realize that by buying from companies that follow practices you want to promote, or don't follow practices that you don't want to promote, you're doing as much as you possibly can. You're just not eliminating it totally from the manufacturing chain.

Third: consumers have a lot of power, but it isn't always used for good. Case in point, indie cosmetics. When people get the mistaken idea that "pure" or "mineral" makeup is the only safe makeup, or that "handmade" is somehow superior in all respects to "resold", businesses are faced with a choice: adopt the new imprecise definitions that consumers are using that week, and risk shading the truth about their products and then getting pilloried when consumers find any deviation from their current standard of "acceptable"; or don't set up a business because they can't fit whatever standards consumers are holding up this month and simultaneously be able to feed themselves and their families. Either way pretty much sucks.

And while we're on Point The Third, I'd like to address the whole foofaraw about mineral makeup. I've read comments by people that denigrate "girls who throw some pigments and some base mix together". Okay, so what precisely meets your standards of an acceptable product to sell? Define it clearly for all of us, so that we can all have a common frame of reference. Sure, it's possible to buy base mixes from wholesalers. But even then, a seller may combine two or three "base mixes" or base-mix-type ingredients to get a certain effect. The seller has to know what effect they want to achieve and why, and they have to experiment with ratios (probably for almost every product, too - a deep blue shadow may have slightly different ratios than a lighter blue shadow, and a blush will have different ingredients than an eyeshadow - even a light pink eyeshadow.) Or they may want to mix a ratio of base mix, pigment, mica, and something like carnauba wax. But see, that's just mixing ingredients too. Bakers don't do anything different when they make cupcakes, and I don't see a great big uprising against cupcake vendors saying "You didn't make this yourself, you didn't harvest the flour yourself, you just mixed some ingredients and baked them in cupcake papers and decorated them!!" Is mixing multiple (more than two) ingredients sufficiently complex enough to meet your standards of "an acceptable product to spend my money on"? Or are you going to condemn that as "not original enough"? And if a company makes most of their products themselves but sells the occasional product in a nearly-repackaged state because they like the color and think that their customers will too, why should they have to mark that handful of products as something separate, as if they're of lesser quality for not being more complex? The indie-makeup-buying public can't seem to collectively make up its mind about what it wants and doesn't want, and this conflicting and incomplete information is transmitted to new buyers - many of whom look at the carnage and decide to stick with drugstore or department-store makeup, rather than risk wading into the (to outward appearances) shark pit that is buying from indie makeup vendors. This environment makes it harder on honest earnest sellers, because there's almost no way to please everyone with a new startup company unless you have a trust fund to pay your bills for the first five years while you learn to create the products and get established; and easier for less scrupulous sellers, because if sellers comb the forums and read the rants and reactionary angry posts they know what trigger-phrases to use to get folks to buy - whether the product is any good or not. They know your triggers. You've laid them all right out. And they know your blind spots, because you've laid those all out, too.

"Handmade" is not automatically superior. "Resold" is not automatically inferior. If indie-makeup buyers keep trying to insist on those extreme viewpoints, they'll foster a marketplace that few earnest, honest sellers will be able to enter because you all but demand 10-years'-experience-quality straight out of the gate, with no room for anything but totally unique items that you can't possibly get anywhere else. Yes, there will always be sellers who shade the truth or outright lie. Selling is, in part, the art of stretching the absolute truth to convince the buyer that they need Item X, that it will solve some problem that they have. When selling things like makeup or jewelry or decorative items or luxury, the merchant either has to *only* target people who have income that they can literally throw away (truly disposable income), or you have to twist the truth like a carnival contortionist (if you buy this makeup, it will make you more attractive / less unattractive and thus more successful in life / happier.) Obviously, there are sellers who take this "shading the truth" bit too far, and straight-up lie about their products or services: "buy this product and your breath will always smell sweet as honey, even right after you've eaten a curry. And you'll fart rainbows. Just like a unicorn. This product contains actual glee bottled from unicorn farts, so we know this to be true." Those sellers should be reported to the Consumer Protection Agency and any other appropriate regulatory body (the Better Business Bureau is not a "regulatory body", because they can not and will not enforce laws or levy any kind of penalty for noncompliance - other than listing that sellers are unhappy with them, which is what blogs and forums now do.) Sellers should provide you a good, safe product, should give you enough information about the product that you feel that you will be getting good value for the money, and should get your product sent to you quickly, efficiently, and without spillage / breakage.

What I personally want from an indie mineral makeup vendor is a product that is easy to use, a product that's safe for its intended use, preferably loose-powder items with no preservatives and only inert ingredients (so that the products don't go bad), a product that wears a long time, a product that doesn't cost as much as its equivalent from Bare Escentuals or MAC, and I'd like something that's somehow unique: it's highly pigmented or has excellent, the color palette features bright shades, the texture is almost undetectable, it wears for a very long time, it applies very easily, or it's a shade of a color that I can't quite find anywhere else. I don't have the stringent ingredients-requirements that others do (must be vegan, may not contain any traces of bismuth oxychloride, or other requirements for folks with chemical sensitivities, allergies, or lifestyle preferences). But you'll notice that no where in there do I say things like "You must make the product yourself, it has to be made totally by you from start to finish, and you can't just add some base mix and some pigments and call it done. Oh, and if you sell anything that you don't make yourself, you have to tell me right up front." If someone sells a quality product and sells it for a good price, and doesn't try to claim that they made it all themselves with their own two hands and had help from fairies and pixies and added joy and glee to every gram (or other obvious piles of happy-horseshit), I'll not only buy the product, but I'll tell others about it.

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