Ingredients whose source the label hides

If you avoid animal ingredients, for ethics, religion or diet, the hardest part is not knowing which ingredients are animal. It is that a dozen ordinary names cover an animal origin and a plant one equally, and the label uses the same word for both.

This is that list. It is short, which is the point: it turns reading every line of every label into checking about a dozen names.

Why the names behave this way

Food ingredients are declared by their common or usual name. Cosmetic ingredients are declared by their established name. Both systems name the substance.

Neither names the material it was made from, because two things that are chemically the same get the same name whatever they were made from. That is correct chemistry and it is a dead end for anyone avoiding an origin rather than a molecule. The longer argument is in the guide on INCI names.

The list

Each of those pages sets out what the ingredient is, which origins are actually in commerce, and how likely each one is. None of them can tell you which one is in the jar in your hand, and saying so plainly is the point.

The one that surprises people most

Squalane, because the two origins are so far apart. Squalene was traditionally taken from deep-sea shark liver oil, where it makes up “40-80% of the total oil”, and it is now also made from olive and sugarcane.

Same molecule, same INCI name, and a difference that matters enormously to someone worried about deep-sea shark fisheries. There is no shark squalane and olive squalane on a label. There is squalane.

The ones that look like this and are not

Worth knowing, because avoiding them wastes effort.

Lactic acid sounds like milk and is almost always a fermentation product, usually from plant sugars. Citric acid sounds like citrus and is almost always fermentation. Stearic acid does fork by source, but the name is not the reason: nothing in it suggests an animal at all.

The general lesson is that a name suggesting an origin is not evidence of one, in either direction.

What actually answers the question

Certification. Vegan, halal and kosher marks audit the supply chain, which is the level where the answer lives. That is information the ingredient list structurally cannot carry, and it is why certification exists rather than being a formality.

A front-of-pack claim. Plant-derived versions of several of these cost more to make, so companies that use them say so. The claim is unregulated in most markets, and its absence is more informative than absences usually are, because a company paying for the more expensive route has a commercial reason to tell you.

Asking. Unsatisfying, and often the only route. The manufacturer knows its suppliers.

Using the list well

Do not read every line. Read for these names, and treat everything else as settled unless something contradicts it.

That is a genuine time saving and it is also more accurate, because attention spent on ingredients that never fork is attention not spent on the ones that do. The reader-side version of this is on the page for avoiding animal ingredients, and the religious-observance version, where the same list applies with different stakes, is on the halal and kosher page.