Cosmetics are intended to enhance or beautify the body, especially the face. Cosmetics in Australia include all make-up and skin and hair care products, as well as things like toothpaste, mouthwash, soap, perfume, and sunscreen. However, the very cosmetics responsible for what is generally an uplifting experience, come with a darker side that can take the shine off any glowing countenance.

PETA: “Companies test on animals to provide data that they can use to defend themselves when they are sued by injured consumers.  Companies use the fact the products have been tested – rather than the actual test results – to support the claim that they are conscientious.”

The two main tests used on animals are the Draize Test and the Skin Irritation Test

The Draize Test

After applying the substance being studied to the animal’s eye or skin for hours, it is observed for a week or two to see if irritation occurs. At the end of the test, the animals are killed, brutally, mainly by cervical dislocation (breaking their necks).

Rabbits usually live in groups, seeking comfort from one another when stressed. During these cruel laboratory tests, they are isolated, lonely and afraid.

There’s an eye version of the Draize test where the poor terrified rabbits are locked in restraining stocks, sometimes for days at a time, with their eyes held open with clips. This is to stop them from blinking away the test solution. 

Because rabbits lack tear ducts to cry away test solutions, they are the chosen subjects for these cruel experiments. Also, they’re fast breeders, and fairly cheap to maintain with just the bare minimum of care. One can only imagine how terrifying and painful these useless tests must be for these poor gentle animals.

Skin Irritation Test

A test substance is applied to a shaved section of the rabbits or guinea pigs body, then covered for about four hours, after which any remaining test substance is wiped away. After approximately 14 days the skin is assessed for damage. If the chemical used causes reversible skin lesions, eg. inflammation that may heal partially or fully by the end of the observed period, it is considered an irritant.

These terrified animals can suffer ulcers, bleeding, bloody scabs and inflamed skin. Their torturers are not required to administer pain relief during this hideous prolonged process.

Accuracy: Skin Allergy Test

Chemistry and Cell-based: predicts human reaction accurate to 90%

Guinea Pigs: predicts human reaction accurate to 72%

Accuracy: Draize Skin Irritation Test

Reconstituted human skin: predicts human reaction accurate to 86%

Rabbits: predicts human reaction accurate to 60%.

Animals that have been used to test cosmetics

Rabbits – some tests involve rabbits that are pregnant

Rats – some tests involve rats that are pregnant

Mice

Guinea Pigs

Dogs – rarely used but have been. They are however used to test other chemicals

Humans

At the end of these tortures, the non-human animals are killed!

Humans have much to answer for!

Not tested on animals does not always mean cosmetics are cruelty-free or vegan as they may still contain products derived from animals.

Choosing Cruelty Free

Cruelty-free means “not tested on animals” (Rabbit logo)

If a product is classed as vegan and cruelty-free it means there are no animal ingredients or derivatives used and the product and its ingredients are not tested on animals. Symbol V means vegan and symbol SV means you need to check the labels, as some, not all, of the company’s products are suitable for vegans. These and more definitions are available on the Choose Cruelty-Free website, so you can ensure that the products you are purchasing are in-line with your values.

Some animal-derived ingredients in cosmetics:

ambergris, beeswax, carmine, casein, (also known as sodium caseinate) collagen, fish liver oil gelatin, glycerin, honey, keratin, lactic acid, lanolin, milk, placenta, rennet, shellac, taurine, squalene, guanine, oleo acid, carmine aka cochineal, stearic acid.

Some of these ingredients can also be plant-based, eg. glycerin or glycerol
labelled E422 in food, is a by-product of soap manufacturing and can be
either synthetic or derived from plants or animals.

Lactic acid can also be derived from plants such as beets. When it is derived from animals it is found in blood and muscle tissue.

Squalene is extracted from shark liver oil. Vegan squalene is derived from almond oil and soya protein.

You can always check with the company if you’re unsure of the source of an ingredient.

Fortunately, long-overdue change is happening!

Human volunteers who have donated tissues, both healthy and diseased, are providing a more accurate and relevant way of studying human disease and biology than outdated cruel animal experiments.

Human tissue donations can come via surgeries, eg. transplants, biopsies, and cosmetic surgery. Reconstituted human skin and other tissues have been used to develop skin and eye models.

Companies like Mattek and Episkin, CellSystems gmbH produce these tests in kits that are easy to use. They can test cosmetics and do away with the egregiously cruel rabbit irritation test.

The use of data from cosmetic testing on animals has recently been banned in Australia. From 1 July 2020 the regulator won’t be able to accept data from animal testing which is great news for animals.

More than 500,000 animals are killed in cosmetic laboratories around the world annually.

With so many non-animal alternatives that are cruelty free and more effective, it is unconscionable that these precious animals are still being used in some countries to test cosmetics!

Dogs, cats, monkeys, and baboons are not used for cosmetic testing, they have places reserved for them where many other types of torturous experiments are performed. The use of animals in cosmetic testing is questionable, to say the least, the first and possibly the most obvious reason is that animals aren’t humans. What works for animals hardly ever works for humans. In the case of vivisection, 95% of experiments carried out on animals had no positive outcome for humans. Humans and animals have different reactions to different substances, for example, Thalidomide caused limb deformities worldwide in the ’50s but in the animals, it was tested on it seemed ok. The painkiller Paracetamol is suitable for humans but it’s poisonous for cats. Arsenic, on the other hand, is poisonous for humans but does not harm sheep. Learn more about animals used in medicine here.

International

Many countries around the world including the EU, Norway, Israel, and India have embraced 21st-century science and recognised that cosmetic testing on animals is antiquated and inhumane. Therefore, they have banned cosmetic testing on animals completely. Vietnam has ended the cruel Draize rabbit eye test for cosmetics.

In-vitro genotoxicity and phototoxicity screening methods are more accurate, quicker and cheaper to use than animal testing. Sadly, the USA, China and many other parts of the world are still in the dark ages when it comes to cosmetic testing on animals (exception: California is the only US state that has banned animal-tested cosmetics. It comes into force in January 2020). These backward standards in these countries have many millions of dollars invested in animal testing facilities and will take longer to transition to cruelty-free testing.

Botox

Botox is mostly used cosmetically, but because it’s injected into, rather than being applied to the skin, the EU does not define it as a cosmetic.

Because of this ridiculous loophole, hundreds of thousands of mice die horrific deaths each year by being injected with poison while fully conscious, causing them to slowly suffocate and die through muscle paralysis.

But there is hope!

“Delighted”

Dr Katy Taylor, Cruelty Free International’s Director of Science, said: “We are delighted that Ipsen has successfully gained the approval of a non-animal alternative in Europe. This will put an end to the cruel killing of hundreds of thousands of mice for the testing of botox products. It is unacceptable that animals go through an agonizing death for a product used for cosmetic purposes when a non-animal alternative is available. We urge other botox companies to make cruel botox animal tests a thing of the past.”

Botox itself contains no animal products, but it is not suitable for vegans because it is tested on animals.

Testing on animals is egregiously cruel.

We owe it to the animals to ensure they are free to exhibit their natural behaviours, are not confined, tortured and ultimately killed.

For the animals, for a kinder world and for your peace of mind, choose vegan and cruelty-free.

Author: Alana B
Occupation: Retired
Animal Rights Activist

References

Science Museum Brought to Life: Thalidomide

Cosmetic Animal Testing: Rachel Wells and April Mendoza

Humane Society International

Aussie Farms

Cruelty Free International

 Choose Cruelty Free

PETA   

Plant Based News

Hot flashes and night sweats are no fun for menopausal women, but the oestrogen-replacement drug Premarin, commonly prescribed to alleviate menopausal symptoms, is attained through such shockingly cruel methods, there’s a high chance the majority of women would seek an alternative. That is, if they had knowledge of what happens to horses to manufacture the drug. Premarin is made from horse urine – the drug’s name is short for PREgnant MARes’ urINe. Mares are impregnated annually for the sole purpose of collecting their oestrogen-rich urine. The business model of nightmares and one we see across the species, horses don’t escape the extreme confinement that is a hallmark of animal agriculture. They are tied up in stalls so small that they are unable to move either backwards, forwards, or sideways or lie down comfortably. To collect the urine, they stand with sacks strapped to their groins for months on end.  These horses are denied water and then given some in restricted quantities in order to make their urine more concentrated. This means these mares are constantly thirsty. Heavily pregnant, confined to a space barely bigger than their own swollen, dehydrated bodies.  When the mare’s baby is born, the little foal is considered “byproducts,” only brought into this world for their mother’s urine. Most of these little foals are fattened up, slaughtered, and sold as horsemeat for human consumption or turned into dog food.

The thought of going through a menopause without any chemical assistance is a daunting one for most women, but fortunately, there are humane alternatives to Premarin available.  One such treatment is Cenestin, manufactured by Duramed Pharmaceuticals, which does the same job as Premarin and is derived from plant sources (soybeans and yams).  Given circumstances under which Premarin is harvested, and the choice of an alternative that doesn’t involve atrocity-upon-atrocity, any compassionate human would give horse urine as medicine a miss. 

Author: Catherine Wright
Occupation: Project Manager
Animal Rights Activist

A commonly used phrase in the medical research and pharmaceutical industries is that animal testing is an “unfortunate necessity”. This widely accepted phrase is simply incorrect. While animal testing is certainly “unfortunate”, it is by no means a “necessity” for improving human health. In fact, animal testing for medical research, also known as vivisection, could actually be detrimental to humans.

Non-human animals are NOT good models for human disease

“They are so ingrained in trying to cure mice that they forget we are trying to cure humans”. – Dr. Ronald W. Davis, genomics expert, Stanford University.

The most fundamental biological principle as to why animal testing does not work is, quite simply, animals are not smaller versions of humans. Animals, though genetically very similar, have distinct physiological differences to humans that make it impossible to draw links between the two.

The fact is this; animals do not develop human diseases. And the complex mechanisms by which human diseases occur cannot be replicated in animals. This is why so many animal models are cured of diseases with treatments that do not work in humans.

This effect becomes even more pronounced when an animal is in a stressed environment, such as a laboratory. In these environments, animal physiology changes, and the way they respond to disease is different to how they would respond in a natural environment. If, even in the best circumstances, animal models cannot translate to humans, how could they in an environment where they cannot even translate to the rest of their species?¹

DRUGS

“Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are like us.’ Ask the experimenters why it is morally OK to experiment on animals, and the answer is: ‘Because the animals are not like us.’ Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.” – Dr. Charles R. Magel.

Did you know that 92% of drugs that pass pre-clinical testing (of which vivisection makes up a large part) then go on to fail in humans, either because they are ineffective or unsafe?² More recent studies indicate this number could be closer to 96%.³ Imagine if a surgery that was recommended by national guidelines had a failure rate of 90%. There would, rightly so, be outrage. Yet this is the failure rate associated with the current recommended methods of drug development. These odds would be unacceptable in any other facet of medicine, so why is animal testing any different?

TOXICOLOGY

“Animal studies are done for legal reasons and not for scientific reasons. The predictive value of such studies for man is meaningless.” – Dr James D. Gallagher, Director of Medical Research, Lederle Laboratories.

Toxicology is a field of medical science that investigates how toxic or carcinogenic chemicals are to humans. It is based on the assumption that the physiology of non-human animals is sufficiently similar to human physiology to produce results that are replicable between species. There is now a large, and still growing, body of evidence to suggest this is not the case.⁴ For example, an animal bioassay is considered the gold standard for identifying cancer-causing chemicals. This bioassay involves mice and rats to be exposed to maximally tolerated doses of chemicals for two years and costs millions of dollars for each assay. It also has a positive predictive value of 20%.⁵ This means that only 20% of chemicals that are identified as definite or probable carcinogens in rodents actually are in humans. Again, imagine a surgery with an 80% chance of failure. Would you accept those odds?

Similar results have occurred when other methods of toxicology have been analysed, simply because translating physiological results from one species to another is scientifically flawed.^6-8

HARMS TO HUMANS

“We have cured mice of cancer for decades–and it simply didn’t work in humans.” – Dr. Richard Klausner, director of the National Cancer Institute 1995-2001.

There is no shortage of examples of cases in which vivisection has caused direct harms to humans. The TGN1412 disaster in 2006 is one such example. TGN1412 was an experimental therapy being trialled for use in autoimmune conditions, designed to dampen down the immune system. In it’s pre-clinical phase it had been tested in mice, rats, rabbits, and even certain strains of monkeys specifically chosen because of the similar way to humans TGN1412 acts in the body, at doses of 400 times the amount you would give to humans. Despite this thorough pre-clinical testing, within minutes of this compound being administered in the human volunteers, severe side effects were observed. The compound acted in the opposite way to what was observed in animals, and instead amplified the immune response. All volunteers went to hospital in severe pain, one had dramatic head swelling, and several ended up with permanent organ damage.⁹

Possibly even scarier than the direct harms caused to humans by vivisection are the indirect harms. If so many cures have been found for diseases in animals that do not work in humans, it then logically follows that there would be many cures that would work in humans but do not work in animals. Unfortunately, with the setup of the system at the moment, these potential cures would have been discarded at the pre-clinical phase and their potential for cure in humans unexplored. There have already been examples of anti-cancer drugs (tamoxifen, Gleevec) that caused liver toxicity in rats but were persevered with due to promising results in human cell cultures and are now huge parts of cancer therapy.

Another indirect harm of vivisection is the misplacement of research funds. As anyone in the medical research world would know, funding has never been harder to find than it is now. In the US, the National Institute of Health spends half its funding on animal experimentation. Most of these experiments will not have a dramatic impact on human health, for the reasons stated above. Surely this funding can be funneled into more resource-efficient areas in order to have the best outcomes for human health.

Another resource that is being misplaced with vivisection is time. All research takes time, but animal experimentation often takes many, many years for any conclusions to be drawn, whether they be positive or negative. In the meantime, people are suffering from diseases that may not (in fact, most likely not) even benefit from the results of the research in the first place.¹

HARMS TO ANIMALS

“It [referring to dog labs] did more to damage my identity as a physician than anything else. I learned nothing physiological. I learned that life is cheap, and that misery can be ignored.” – Dr. Murray Cohen, MD.

Talk to most researchers who use animals in Australia and they will tell you about the stringent ethical guidelines they have to adhere to, the 20-page ethics approval they first have to complete before they can even touch an animal, the 3R’s (replacement, reduction and refinement) that they quote as if by doing so no animals are harmed. But even the most passionate supporters of vivisection cannot deny that it is not in the best interests of the animal. This is why they label vivisection not just as a necessity (though of course this too is false), but also as an unfortunate one.

Who is animal experimentation?

They are Britches, the baby monkey who was taken from his mother and had his eyes sown shut at birth to investigate maternal deprivation and childhood blindness in a study methodology that provides little clinically useful information.

They are the lambs shaken to death to replicate child abuse when the results of the study could have, and already had been, deduced from the examination of human cases.

They are the cats whose spinal cords have been crushed as a model for spinal cord injury, and the rats and mice whose brains are literally picked apart to create a model for dementia, a disease which only exists in humans and is unlikely to be cured in animals.
They are the dogs who have never known love or companionship but are still so trusting that they lick the same hands that poison them.

115 million animals are used in research worldwide every year. They are kept in miserable conditions, subjected to horrible procedures and suffer every single day of their lives. Supporters of vivisection seem to believe that we have to choose between human and animal well-being in order to achieve medical progress. Luckily the reality is far simpler than that, and what is best for the animals is also what is best for humans.¹⁰

ALTERNATIVES

“We sacrificed daily from one to three dogs, besides rabbits and other animals, and after four years experience, I am of the opinion that not one of these experiments on animals was justified or necessary.” – Dr. George Hogan.

If animal experimentation is abolished, those millions of dollars currently being spent on the industry can be put towards promising alternatives that are increasingly being used. “Alternative” in medicine is a dangerous word due to its pseudo-scientific connotations, but these alternatives to vivisection are based on real science and certainly better science than the fundamentally flawed concepts upon which vivisection is based.

Some of these alternatives are already being used in conjunction with animal testing. The issue with continuing this practice is that human-based tests and animal-based tests frequently result in different conclusions. When this happens there is no way of knowing which results are accurate, and more often than not the results from the animal testing are deemed to be correct for reasons that are more historical than scientifically justifiable.

In vitro experiments, informally known as “test tube” experiments, are experiments in which the reactions of cells to stimuli are observed. When human-based cells are used in toxicology, for example, they have been proven to be far more accurate at detecting toxic chemicals than animal-based tests (83% accuracy vs. 59% accuracy).^{11, 12} Even despite there being many more similar findings ^{13, 14}, in vitro testing is still criticized by the scientific community because it does not represent a whole body system, whereas animal experiments do. While in vitro testing can be simplistic, this argument can only be valid if there is already a method of accurately replicating whole human body systems. But, as explained above, the fact is that whole animal body systems simply do not reflect whole human body systems.

A similar concept to studying human cell cultures and expanding that to a whole body system is that of microdosing. Microdosing is used in drug development, where instead of studying the effects of the drug in animals, the drug is administered in tiny doses in human volunteers, and the cellular effects monitored. The dosage at which the drugs are administered are too low for toxic effects to occur at a system level, but large enough that effects on cells can be studied. Microdosing has been criticized for the same reasons as in vitro testing, but is also baseless for the same reasons too, especially as the methods used for replicating human systems in current drug development has a failure rate of 92-96%.

Similar to in vitro testing, studies are now being done on the effects of stimuli (mostly drugs) to specific human genes.¹⁵ The fact that this is possible at all is a credit to how far science has come, and continuing to use animal gene testing instead of transitioning to this current human gene technology is borderline scientifically negligent, and represents nothing more than a stubbornness to move with the times.

Possibly the most exciting development in alternatives to vivisection is organs-on-chips. These chips, the size of computer memory cards, are composed of human cells and designed to replicate human organs. If multiple organ systems can be replicated on chips, a whole body system can be developed to accurately predict human responses to drugs (for example).¹⁶ Organs-on-chips are often scorned by those who conduct animal experiments, but to anyone who has doubts please watch this video on the lung-on-a-chip the Wyss Institute at Harvard has designed and been able to achieve so far with it.

All these alternatives do not even touch on the other huge part of medical research separate to lab-based studies – clinical research. So much can be learned from simply observing a human population and the way they develop and respond to human diseases. This is a field of research called epidemiology, which has already been hugely influential in the understanding of public health and surrounding policy building that has developed from that.

Author: Dr Mehr Gupta
Co-founder and Campaign Director, Animal Liberation Tasmania

References

1. AKHTAR A. The Flaws and Human Harms of Animal Experimentation. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics. 2015; 24(04):[407-19 pp.].
2. FDA. Innovation or Stagnation, Challenge and Opportunity on the Critical Path to New Medical Products Rockville. 2004.
3. Pippin J. Animal research in medical sciences: Seeking a convergence of science, medicine, and animal law. South Texas Law Review. 2013; 54:[469-511 pp.].
4. Schmidt C. Researchers Exploring Faster Alternatives to 2-Year Test for Carcinogenicity. Journal of the National Cancer Institute. 2006; 98(4):[228-30 pp.].
5. Knight A, Bailey J, Balcombe J. Animal carcinogenicity studies: 1. Poor human predictivity. Alternatives to laboratory animals : ATLA. 2006; 34(1):[19-27 pp.].
6. Heywood R. Target organ toxicity. Toxicology letters. 1981; 8(6):[349-58 pp.].
7. Gori GB. The costly illusion of regulating unknowable risks. RTP. 2001; 34(3):[205-12 pp.].
8. Fletcher AP. Drug safety tests and subsequent clinical experience. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 1978; 71(9):[693-6 pp.].
9. Bracken MB. Why animal studies are often poor predictors of human reactions to exposure. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 2009;102(3):120-122.
10. Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics. Normalising the Unthinkable: The Ethics of Using Animals in Research. 2015.
11. Clemedson C, McFarlane-Abdulla M, FA A, al. e. MEIC evaluation of acute systemic toxicity. Part II. In vitro results from 68 toxicity assays used to test the first 30 reference chemicals and a comparative cytotoxicity analysis. ATLA. 1996; 24:[273-311 pp.].
12. Clemedson C, Barile F, Chesne C, al. e. MEIC evaluation of acute systemic toxicity. Part VII. Prediction of human toxicity by results from testing of the first 30 reference chemicals with 27 further in vitro assay. ATLA. 2000; 28:[161-200 pp.].
13. Voskoglou-Nomikos T, Pater JL, Seymour L. Clinical Predictive Value of the in Vitro Cell Line, Human Xenograft, and Mouse Allograft Preclinical Cancer Models. Clinical Cancer Research. 2003; 9(11):[4227-39 pp.].
14. Mayor S. Researchers refine in vitro test that will reduce the risk of “first in humans” drug trials. BMJ. 2008; 337.
15. Coghlan A. Pioneers cut out animal experiments. New Scientist. 1996.
16. Bhatia S, Ingber D. Microfluidic organs-on-chips. Nature. 2014; 32(8):[760-72 pp.].