Alternative Methods of Animal Testing

April 2023

Ruby Chen

For many years, cosmetic testing on animals has always been a very controversial topic. Although many people argued that it is an essential procedure to ensure our safety, it is still widely condemned by many animal rights activists and organizations. Moreover, with our current technology, cosmetic testing on animals is truly unnecessary and unethical.

Lab animals, often rabbits, mice, rats, and guinea pigs, are either forced to swallow chemical substances, get it injected into their eyes, or have it smeared it on their skin compulsively. These processes lead to their eventual death. This is not only cruel and inhumane, but also unnecessary, given the availability of alternative testing methods that do not require animal experimentation. An example is human cell-based tests and sophisticated computer models.

XCellR8, a cruelty-free human cell-based cosmetic testing method developed by a UK laboratory, uses scaffolds of cells from human skin donated by plastic surgery patients to produce artificial skin for cosmetics testing. The test results are based on how the artificial skin reacts to the cosmetic compound, which is much more accurate than animal testing, since real skins and artificial skins have higher biological similarities to humans than animals. Additionally, Europe developed a computer program named COSMOS that can predict how cosmetics substances interact with human tissue. Both ways of cosmetic testing are cruelty-free, accurate enough to ensure our safety, and way more efficient than animal testing.

Animal testing is a huge industry in the world. Though it is impossible to completely stop it in a short period of time, we can contribute to such efforts by stopping support of cosmetic brands that test on animals and buying affordable cruelty-free brands, such as Elf and NYX, two commonly seen and affordable brands in Taiwan.