Thanks for your interest in pawsitive!

pawsitive is a project we started in 2019 with several goals:

to increase awareness about animal cruelty in the production of cosmetics
to drive consumer behavior change by providing simple tools for making a stand against unnecessary animal cruelty
to promote organizations brands that go the extra mile in supporting animal rights
to experiment with using AI for an ethical cause
to learn from the collaboration with like-minded students and partners through each phase of launching pawsitive

pawsitive is a collaborative effort - we could not have done this without all the help and support of friends, family, developers - thank you, all!

How it started

First things first.

We love animals. That's obvious. We would not want to hurt animals. Ever. Also obvious, you might say. But is it?

One of our favorite cosmetic brands turned out to not be cruelty-free. What a disappointment... Sure, the brand can do as they wish (not that we approve) but we would not have purchased jar after jar after jar of yummy lip balm and we would not have been giving it as a gift to closest friends if we knew all this.

Whose fault is that?

Ours. We didn't take the extra minute or 5 or 25 to check. It seemed a brand like that would never do something like squirt chemicals in the eyes of test animals over and over to make sure that our lip balm passes all tests. No, we don't need lip balm. Not at this price.

Actually, that's not how it started.

It started when we got a call from a mom who listens obsessively to a certain podcast. One of the podcasters (is that the word?) told a story that was breaking out in 2022 about 4000 beagle puppies rescued before they were to be sold to biotech labs. Read about it here.

You might not be thinking that looking at these puppies, but people also do great things.

Yes, ALL beagles have been adopted. So if you are feeling grateful and generous, please donate to the Humane Society. Do it often. Only then consider supporting us here.

We can't change the world over night. But we can compound small improvements.

Back to how it started. We decided that we will be checking all products we buy. We decided that we will be more active in advocating and taking actions against animal cruelty. We are not going to engage in endless debates, we will simply taking all the actions we can think of.

Even then we missed things. 🚫 Refer to the lip balm story. So terrible. We thought we knew better...

It turned out that this takes a lot of time and that's how the idea of pawsitive was born. Then it took a lot of time too. We started making a huge database of products and researching what is CF what isn't. It. was. slow.

And then! ChatGPT came along and we started asking it? You know what, it is not perfect but it is way faster than what we were able to do. Now we are working with various LLMs figuring out the most sustainable path to making this extension a no brainer for everyone who wants to use it.

Our conviction is only getting stronger.

Join us if you would like to check the products you buy are cruelty free.

Join us if you have some skills you can volunteer.

Join us if you would like to donate (remember! after the Humane society)

or just say hello here.