Animal testing: what exactly are we talking about?

Today China tests its cosmetic products and ingredients on about 300,000 animals every year. We can therefore deduce that the global total is much higher.

Before the 2000s, the cosmetics industry could use animal testing to ensure the safety of ingredients and finished products.

Consumers and associations started to lobby to defend animals and stop this cruelty. Thus, the first European amendment came to ban the testing of finished products on animals.

This amendment was followed by a European Commission law banning European cosmetics manufacturers from testing their products on animals. This law came into force in 2013.

In 2016, the European Court of Justice also banned the import of cosmetics tested on animals.

Today about 40 countries, including all EU countries, ban animal testing of cosmetics. Among them, South Korea, Switzerland, India, Norway and others. In the United States only 3 states (California, Nevada and Illinois) also ban the practice.

What are these tests?

First of all, the products are tested during all the manufacturing stages, i.e. the tests will affect the finished product as well as the ingredients that make it up.

The tests are skin irritation, safety and toxicity tests for the most part. There are also spray or injection tests, which take different forms depending on the needs and what is to be tested.

The aim is to check whether the product proves to be toxic or irritating when used by humans.

For methodological purposes, a concentrated dose of the product or ingredient being tested is used on a large number of animals. Mice, rats, hamsters and rabbits are the most commonly used animals.

Unfortunately, the reality is much more cruel, animals are not only tested in a simple way. For example, to test a skin cream, animals are shaved, a concentrated dose of the product is applied to their skin and left on for several days.

Products that might come into contact with human eyes are tested directly in the animals' eyes without anaesthetic. Rabbits are the most commonly used animals for this experiment as they do not produce tears. Therefore the product cannot be released from their eyes. These tests can inflict injuries and trauma on the guinea pigs; the injuries can range from eye irritation to eyeball perforation.

For those animals that survive these repeated experiments, they end up being killed by the laboratory workers.

Fortunately, today we have other alternatives in use to replace animal testing:

- The in vitro method: products are tested on artificially duplicated human or animal cells. This makes it possible to distinguish between toxic and non-toxic ingredients without poisoning animals.

- The in vivo method: products are tested on live animal tissue.

- The in silico method: scientists recreate computer models and compare the data with known molecules.

- The use of laboratory-grown tissues and cells (this process is more accurate than traditional rabbit tests)

Another solution is to encourage or oblige companies to manufacture products with safe raw materials and ingredients that have already been proven to be effective. This would avoid the need for constant new testing to create new products.

Today cosmetic brands and companies need to realise that there are other ways to test products. It is time to stop all this cruelty to animals.

At the same time we would like to remind you that our Revitalizing Eye Cream is not tested on animals.

In addition, we support animals by donating to a charity.

Zoé