Imagine, one day you come home from school or work and your beloved pet is missing. You post signs everywhere only to find your pet on the streets with red puffy eyes, and he is unable to even open them. Your pet has a tag on it saying, experiment #212 with the logo of your favorite makeup brand. You take your pet to the vet to find out that they have been tested on with some kind of chemical compound similar to mascara. Unfortunately, your pet has passed away due to the vet not being able to fix the complications from the infection. Your pet was one result of millions of animals being tested on for cosmetic purposes.
Animal testing for beauty products should be illegal in the United States because it may permanently harm an animal or kill it. However, it is okay in the rare case that animal testing is used for medical purposes. Animal testing for beauty products began as early as 1938 when makeup and all of those things became more popular. Animal testing is when live-animals undergo a test for a formula in makeup, or a chemical going into the formula to test if its harmful to human skin or eyes.
Only invertebrate animals are used, like mammals. Some people think that animal testing just stops at rats/mice but, for beauty products testing it can be dogs, cats, rabbits, and monkeys. Approximately, 100,000-200,000 animals suffer and die every year as a result of animal testing for beauty products. As previously stated, animal testing is to ensure that the makeup formula or a chemical going into the makeup is not harmful to our skin and eyes.
To explain it a little more, they test it for its overall toxicity. If a beauty product like shampoo, sunscreen, eyeshadow, or mascara could permanently blind a person or burn their skin off, why would they want to use it? They use it because the company’s products are in demand because of popularity. Popularity like celebrity endorsements, youtubers, or Instagram stars. The company should just use less harmful chemicals in their products so that they do not have to test the products on animals. A controversy surrounding animal testing is that the animals may suffer and die as a result of the pigment is just beautiful or my winged eyeliner looks flawless. These animal testings are cruel to animals, correct? Well, the United States has animal cruelty laws in all 50 states, yet this is still legal. Some companies have already banned animal testing with their beauty products, and are trying to put an end to all of it.
The beauty company LUSH. For more than 30 years, they have been fighting against animal testing. It’s Cruel and ineffective, and despite some changes in the last four decades, there’s still so much more to be done, says the LUSH company. This company advertises for animal testing awareness on all of their products like bags, packaging, and even on the receipts. In Europe, India, Israel, and Norway animal testing for cosmetics are banned. One good thing that has come out of animal testing, is animal testing for medical purposes. Due to animals and people being able to get the same illnesses some research is very beneficial to humankind. All medical research is planned out, and experts only use animal experimentation for urgent purposes. Scientists do try to keep the welfare of the animal in mind as they are experimenting, which means a small number of an applicable species can be used.
Veterinarians are an essential part of the medical research team. The veterinarians make sure that the animal is being treated humanely and they also provide the medical/surgical support. The animals are protected through laws, regulations, and policies to provide humane treatment to all of the animals in the research. The Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and the Animal Welfare Act give details about day-to-day animal care. Some good examples of animal testing for medical research would be on dogs to discover insulin for people with diabetes, monkeys for the polio vaccine, pigs for skin grafts for burn victims, and mice for a rabies vaccine.
Many people are against animal testing for beauty-products but, of course, we have people that would love to say that it is okay. Animals are a great way to further research on humans. This makes sense but, not all animals have the genetic makeup of a human. That means that these innocent animals that are not similar to humans were just inhumanely slaughtered all in the name of research. If scientists would like to discover more about humans, they could find some humans that have no problem being tested on. Some people believe that animal testing is cheaper than others.
This is also false. The USA spends $16 million dollars annually for animal testing at the taxpayer’s dollar. Animal testing with beauty products is a short and fast process. The process to test if a company’s eyeliner is not harmful, takes a while because they have to wait for the animals’ eyes or skin to get red, irritate, or burn. Chemicals are left on animals for up to 2 weeks to make sure all the side effects or infections are caught in the research before sending the product out in the market. Some alternative methods for animal testing are Computer models, Cells and tissue cultures, and Alternative organisms. The first method, Computer models.
Computers can help to understand basic biology. There are computer generated simulations that can predict various biological and toxic effects of a chemical drug without animal testing. A common know software is Computer Aided Drug Design (CADD) which is used to identify the probable binding site and hence avoids testing of unwanted chemicals having no biological activity. Then when results are found, instead of putting animals through the whole process of testing, they can be used in the final stage for confirmation. The second method is the Cells and tissue cultures.
The use of in vitro cell and tissue cultures which involve the growth of cells outside the body in a laboratory environment which can be an important alternative for animal experiments. Cells and tissue from the animals’ different organisms are taken out and can be stored outside if the body for months or even years. The chemical or formulas can then be tested on the cell or tissue and can see the reaction. The benefits correlated with these techniques are easy to follow, less time consuming, and less expensive. These methods are usually used for screening of a potential drug or chemical to check the toxicity. The third method is Alternative Organisms.
The whole reason for using animal testing is to use animals with vertebrates, as stated before. So in this case, scientists could use alternative organisms like lower vertebrates, Danio rerio, this fish has a transparent body which gives easy visual access the internal anatomy. Another organism would be invertebrates, Drosophila melanogaster, also known as the fruit fly. This genome is a very common invertebrate studied in science.
In Conclusion, animal testing should be illegal for beauty products because it harms the animals permanently, damages their eyesight or skin, and could potentially kill the animal if the chemical is harsh enough. If the chemical is that harmful, to begin with then those chemicals should not be distributed on the market. Using alternative methods would help the human population and keep all the animals safer. The exception to animal testing would only be for medical research to help the human race due to some animals containing the same genomes or genetic makeup as humans do.