The animal fur and leather industry is quite the bloody one. They make gigantic coats out of little rabbits and rodents (chinchilla) and sell them for a fortune. The verdict of such fashion ‘statements’ – eco-friendly: unlikely, animal friendly: for certain NO! But I don’t really want to touch on fur and hide today. Instead I want to focus on the lesser noticed feathers.
Are feathers beautiful? Absolutely and their softness is as unique as the snowy white coat of the arctic rabbit which means the bustling plumes of a rare bird are as prized as that of a snow leopard. Which leads me to the question, how many little birds do you have to ‘harvest’ feathers from to make that one handbag? Actually I saw a beautiful evening purse covered in entirety with amazingly breathtaking feathers and I wondered to myself, is it possible that the feathers are synthetics? And if so how deep is the carbon footprints involved in their make?
As it’s obvious the question wasn’t going to answer itself, I did some research on my own. It wasn’t very fruitful as while I was able to conclude that there are synthetic feathers, what they were made of is still a mystery to me so I can’t tell you what the carbon footprints are like.
However what I could discover was the fact that most of the time, what is labeled as synthetic/artificial feather is actually real feathers but usually that of the ostrich or the pheasant bird. They are then simply recolored and shaped to the desired form. So that should mean that such ‘artificial feathers’ are eco-friendly and less animal brutal (seemingly a by-product of the food industry) right? Wrong…at least on the eco-friendly remark because that is completely dependent on the dying process and the dying materials used.
So the bottom line is, artificial feathers artificial aren’t quite that artificial at all – they are real feathers usually of the ‘legal birds’ and are synthetically coloured and shaped to mimic those of protected species. Are they eco and animal friendly – well I would answer maybe to the former and not by a long shot to the latter.
