Welcome to The Ethical Card! As you may know, we are a group of hair and makeup artists working in the film, theatre and television industries, and we wanted to help make a change towards more sustainable practises in our departments!
As I’m sure many stories will now go, it all started in lockdown. Spob, asked me, Helena Card (Hi!) to come up with a little list of brands that had more sustainable practises that we could use on future productions. Spob and I have worked together for years, in fact she gave me my very first job, so of course I was happy to help.
Being in lockdown and finding myself with not an awful lot to do, I constructed quite an extensive spreadsheet of brands and vendors that fulfilled all areas of purchasing in our department. I also created quite the document of things I considered to be ‘better practises’ (nothing is going to be perfect) for the department going forward, as well as doing some very dry reading of EU cosmetic regulation at 5:30 am, when I inexplicably woke up very early one morning.
To be honest I did this thinking no one would pay that much attention, but it was something to do. I was wrong. Spob took it and sent it to some other makeup artists and apparently they were quite pleased with the little directory I’d created and wanted to make it more accessible to everyone in the industry. Sustainability is, after all, pointless without accessibility.
A small group of us got together and decided to create a website so that we could share this knowledge with everyone. One of the members of our group, Kim Freeland, came up with the name ‘The Ethical Card', a riff on my name, which was quickly voted in (I’m writing this so everyone knows I’m not responsible for that decision, thank you very much). So with that and the help of Spob, Deb Kenton, Sarah Pickering, Jackie Sweeney, Leanne White and a host of wonderful contributors helping us gather information, this website was born.
You’ll find our directory with all sorts of wonderful places and pieces to shop from, should your production require, or you need to replace thing already used in your kit. You’ll also find blog posts and maybe eventually videos on how you can run your departments better and more ethically, as well as just some generally interesting information about how our industry affects our planet, and the people and animals that inhabit it.
I do hope it is useful to people. As we’re all aware the industries we work in tend to be very wasteful by nature, but if we can cut back where we can and put pressure on the productions to run in a way that is as sustainable as possible, I do think we can make a difference. Nothing we do will be perfect, everything will have some payoff, and a lot of things will be more expensive and take more effort but really, that’s nothing compared to us having this lovely home planet to live on.
Helena x