Would you do the work of slaughtering cows? What about pigs, or chickens? What if you used factory farming machines? Could you become desensitized to the factory scenes or would they never bother you at all to begin with?

When we think of meat production, our minds naturally drift to the butcher, a figure steeped in historical imagery, aprons stained with blood, hands actively separating flesh from bone. But in the modern landscape of industrialized agriculture, the people who actually kill the animals occupy a subtly different, though arguably more complex, psychological space. Unlike traditional butchers who handle a carcass with a craftsman’s focus on anatomy and culinary yield, the modern slaughterhouse floor worker is an operator of logistics and mechanized high-speed repetition.

The work is seemingly less grotesque because factory farming machines place a layer of sterile, mechanical distance between the human hand and the animal’s life. Workers pull levers, monitor automated stunners, and ensure kill lines move at optimal speeds. Yet, this mechanical distance is shattered by daily, intimate interactions. Workers must frequently hose down the animals, feed livestock, and maintain their quarters until they are ready for slaughter. This breeds profound psychological distress, unwanted bonding, or a defensive-minded loathing and adversarial emotion towards the helpless sentient beings.

Where the slaughterhouse worker is a numbed cog in a corporate wheel, the squalene harvester operates with the frantic, entrepreneurial greed of a poacher. These hunters cast miles of longlines into the abyss to drag up creatures that are living monuments of evolutionary time. Sharks have swum through Earth’s oceans for 450 million years, making them older than dinosaurs and older than trees. They survived several mass extinction events on Earth, adapting flawlessly to the planet’s violent shifts. To survive the crushing, low-oxygen darkness of the deep ocean without a standard bony swim bladder, they evolved a brilliant biological mechanism, a massive, oil-rich liver packed with naturally occurring squalene. This lightweight lipid grants them perfect, effortless buoyancy deep within the oceans.

The global cosmetics world demands thousands of tons of squalene annually, creating a lucrative market that kills millions of sharks each single year. Sharks are dragged onto decks, abdomens violently sliced open, and livers harvested before their remains are discarded. This practice thrives on a bizarre legal distinction where maritime laws strictly ban shark finning, yet fully permit the harvest of the exact same animal if the fisherman intends to extract liver oil. Under these laws, slicing the fins off a live shark and tossing it back into the ocean is a global crime, but hauling the entire shark onto a vessel, slicing its stomach open for squalene, and discarding the dead body is perfectly legal.

If humans were harvested for our own naturally occurring squalene, the nightmare would be horrific. Human squalene makes up a part of our skin’s natural moisturizing sebum. Human squalene is diffuse, secreted by millions of microscopic glands across the skin on faces and scalps, rather than located in one harvestable organ. A human squalene harvest would require humans be kept alive for the long term, continuously peeled and scraped on schedule. 

If shark harvesting for squalene were scaled to the staggering, unfathomable proportions of terrestrial factory farming or modern commercial overfishing, it would trigger a planetary catastrophe beyond merely Earth’s oceans. Sharks are slow-growing apex predators that take over a decade to reproduce. Scale their slaughter to livestock levels, and they would vanish into extinction within months, collapsing the marine food pyramid. Without sharks, mid-level predators like squid and large bony fish would experience a vast population explosion, completely devouring the smaller fish and shellfish that act as the ocean’s natural grazers. Without a healthy layer of these small fish, surface algae and phytoplankton would initially overgrow into massive blooms, absorbing carbon dioxide and producing temporary spikes of surface oxygen.

However, once these massive blooms exhaust local nutrients, billions of tons of dead algae would sink to the ocean floor. Aerobic bacteria would initially multiply exponentially to decompose the rot, consuming dissolved oxygen faster than the planet can replenish it. The oceans would fall into total anoxia, a toxic, oxygen-free dead zone where any marine life unable to swim away fast enough would inevitably suffocate. This marine collapse would rapidly alter the global atmosphere, destabilizing weather patterns and decimating land animal populations through climate chaos, toxic rainfall, and the total erasure of coastal ecosystems.

Biossance set out with a clean, biotech ethos and pioneered a patented, lab-fermented sugarcane ‘squalane’ as a squalene alternative. Sugarcane-derived ‘squalane’ is practically identical to squalene from sharks’ livers and, at the moment, more viable than other plant-based alternatives. According to Biossance, this sugarcane ‘squalane’ innovation saves an estimated two million sharks every year. To survive as a brand and achieve mass-market influence, Biossance products are now found at Sephora.

At non-pure play stores such as Sephora, conscious marketing is overshadowed by standard consumer habits. The consumer is presented with a largely similar choice, frequently selecting a shark-derived formula based entirely on historical brand prestige. International labeling laws don’t require cosmetic brands to disclose whether their squalene is shark-derived or plant-based. At Sephora stores, Biossance products are sold directly alongside heavily marketed legacy, non-vegan competitors.

Biossance’s founding parent company succumbed to its pure-play brand having to be acquired by a massive global e-commerce conglomerate. While Biossance’s internal formulation remains strictly vegan and shark-free, the brand’s economic reality is now profoundly compromised. The profits generated from conscious consumers purchasing Biossance are funneled directly into a corporate portfolio that owns massive beauty retail platforms and that’ll always prioritize increasing sales towards the greatest dollar value of net profits. Non-vegan beauty brands and retail platforms actively condone, support, and profit from untraceable shark squalene harvests. Nevertheless, a pure-play brand as innovative as Biossance is always a better choice than a non-vegan, cruelty-driven legacy brand.