Animal Tests and Alternatives
Animals including rabbits, guinea pigs, mice and rats are made to suffer and die in a variety of routine tests for cosmetics products and their ingredients. These include:
Repeated dose toxicity
This test assesses whether long-term repeated use of a substance is poisonous. Rabbits or rats are forced to eat or inhale a cosmetics ingredient or have it rubbed onto their shaved skin every day for 28 or 90 days, and are then killed.
Reproductive toxicity
This test assesses whether use of a substance may have an effect on fertility, sexual behaviour, birth and growth of the young. Pregnant female rabbits or rats are force-fed a cosmetics ingredient and then killed along with their unborn babies. Such tests take a long time and use thousands of animals.
Toxicokinetics
This test assesses how a substance is absorbed, distributed, metabolised and excreted by the body. Rabbits or rats are forced to consume a cosmetics ingredient before being killed and their organs examined to see how the ingredient was distributed in their bodies.
Skin sensitisation
This test assesses whether a substance will make the skin increasingly inflamed and itchy each time it is used. A cosmetics ingredient is rubbed onto the shaved skin of guinea pigs and ears of mice to see if they have an allergic reaction. They are then killed.
Carcinogenicity
A carcinogen is a substance that causes cancer or increases the likelihood that someone will develop cancer. To assess this, rats are force-fed a cosmetics ingredient for two years to see if they get cancer and are then killed.
What are the alternatives to using animals to test cosmetics?
The information that has historically been gained from animal tests is increasingly being replaced with quicker, cheaper and more reliable non-animal methods. Many of the animal tests used to test cosmetics ingredients have now been replaced.
These modern methods are more relevant to humans and have been found to predict human reactions better than the traditional outdated animal tests.
For example, to assess skin irritation alternatives such as Reconstituted Human Epidermis, like the skin model EPISKIN, can be used. These tests use reconstituted human skin donated from cosmetic surgery and have been shown to be more effective than the original cruel rabbit Draize skin test that they replace.
Models also exist and can be used to replace cruel animal tests for eye irritation, the effects of skin sensitization can be predicted by looking at proteins in-vitro (in a test tube), and phototoxicity can also be assessed with a cell based test.
Furthermore, companies can prove their products are safe by utilising established ingredients. There are, for example, almost 20,000 ingredients in the European Union’s database for which safety data is available.
Read our detailed scientific report outlining non-animal testing alternatives currently available or in development.