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Because you're worth it

Consumer power and legislation have spurred cosmetics firms to devise new ways to assess their products for safety. Welcome to the end of animal testing.

In the laboratories of Skinethic, a research-and-development subsidiary of French cosmetics giant L’Oréal in Nice, something is stirring. Colonies of keratinocytes—human epidermal cells harvested from donors during plastic surgery—are growing in small plastic vials filled with a collagen gel and a culture medium consisting of water, sugar and amino acids. Feeding on this nutrient solution, the keratinocytes busily proliferate until, clamped into a tiny ring, they reach a size of about five millimetres in diameter. Then the tissue, which its creators call Episkin, is exposed to the air for about 10 days so the surface can dry and age into a tough layer of what feels and looks like—and actually is—real human skin.

The Episkin model isn’t the latest advance in tissue engineering. In fact, its main potential doesn’t apply to human beings at all. The synthetically produced skin could spare thousands of rabbits and guinea pigs the suffering they experience as a result of cosmetic-ingredients testing.

Episkin is one of a number of innovations designed to replace the use of animals in tests of possible side effects caused by the chemicals in cosmetics. Some of these novel procedures require petri dishes, pipettes and similar paraphernalia; others just need a sophisticated algorithm and a (computer) mouse. Whether animal or digital in nature, these new techniques have already put a permanent end to the practise of trying out new shampoos, lotions, powders and lipsticks on lab animals, and may do the same for the testing of chemicals, including cosmetics ingredients, still required today.

Animal-rights activists began decrying animal tests on cosmetics back in the 1970s. But it took the commitment of people like the late Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, to raise awareness of the issue. A 1996 Body Shop no-animal-tests petition to the European Union, for instance, carried more than 4 million signatures. With Roddick and a growing number of like-minded entrepreneurs advocating the abolition of animal tests, shoppers began paying attention—and as a result, so did cosmetics companies.

Of course, it’s not just good corporate citizenship that inspired innovations like Episkin. Starting in March 2009, new EU legislation will ban products with ingredients that were tested on animals, requiring companies like L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and others in the $91 billion cosmetics-and-toiletry industry to develop alternatives. (A handful of more complex safety-assessment methods won’t be banned until 2013.)

L’Oréal alone has devoted more than $1.5 billion to alternative testing methods during the last two decades or so, and its competitors are not lagging far behind. “The legal and ethical requirements—and the scientific tools that are becoming available—will lead to a fundamental rethinking of the way in which we approach safety assessments,” predicts Bertil Heerink, director general of Colipa, the Brussels-based European trade association for the cosmetics, toiletry and perfume industries.

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