By Megan Klemchuk, guest writer.
Thousands of helpless animals die each year due to cosmetic testing. Mice, rats, bunnies, and guinea pigs are the animals most often used in these tests. They are tested for skin irritation/sensitivity, eye irritation, toxicity levels along with many other things in the products we use daily such as shampoo, foundation, lotion, etc.
We should not use animals to test our own personal beauty products to see if they’re harmful or not. We should use alternative methods that scientists have come up with to test cosmetics.
Benefit Cosmetics, a US company, banned testing products on animals in 1989, way before the UK banned animal testing in 2013. Benefit Cosmetics is a part of the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy group and have been using alternative methods to testing makeup since they joined with them in 1989. To this day they are still trying to find new ways to test cosmetics to ban animal testing altogether.
The LVMH group is a multinational luxury goods producer that is against testing cosmetics on animals. They have been using alternative ways to test their products since their creation in 1987.
“In the past 3 decades scientists have developed many advanced alternatives to animal testing- methods that use human blood, cell lines, artificial skin, or computer models to test the safety of products,” wrote Jim Morgan and Paul A. Locke in their article, ‘Beauty and the Beasts: The U.S. Should Ban Testing Cosmetics on Animals’.
These alternatives also happen to be faster and cheaper than using animals. Results when using animals can take 2-4 weeks whereas the use of synthetic skin only takes 3 minutes to 4 hours.
“DakDak, an alternative test used to measure the effectiveness of sunscreens, was reported to do in days what it takes animal studies months to do, and estimates that it can test five or six products for less than half the cost to study a single product in animals,” reads the article ‘Alternatives in Testing’.
Alternative testing methods are much faster, cheaper, more reliable, better for the environment, and are more accurate than testing chemicals on animals. With all these benefits it’s hard to understand why there are still companies harming animals unless they are unable to find the technology to do so. If that is the case the LVMH group is trying to find funding in the hopes that we can eliminate cosmetic testing on animals altogether.
The next time you go to Sephora to get new foundation make sure to check to see if it’s tested on animals or not. If so, set it down and use a different brand instead of supporting the number of deaths of an animal it took to make the foundation okay for us to use.
Some alternative brands you could use are Benefit, Too Faced, and Bare Minerals. They do not test their products on animals.