Animal testing should be banned in cosmetic industry.

Animal testing should be banned, especially in the cosmetic industry. There are quite a few reasons to support this idea but I’d like to address 3 of them here.

First, it is inhumane and cruel. Often, animals for testing are locked in small cages in the lab with no freedom to move around and what they receive is thousands times of unwanted injection, inhalation and forced feeding. For example, rabbits, one of the most commonly-used animals for testing, are forcefully applied an unidentified chemicals or substances into or onto their eyes with their eyelids fixed open so as to prevent them from blinking. They have to keep their eyes open for tens of hours to be injected with unsafe substances for the purpose of developing safe mascara for women, which by the way cannot be seen as a necessity in human lives. What is worse, they are sometimes deprived of food, water or sleep. As such these lab animals are vulnerable to mistreatment and many of them die during the process. Humans do not have the right to use these live beings as means to pursue their profits. It is indeed harsh to these weak and small creatures.

Secondly, it is costly to maintain the facilities for experiments. It is a scientific research which requires independent space, electricity, equipments and so on to carry out the experiments with researchers and various kinds of animals. It takes huge amount of money to keep this test environment, feed and take care of the animals and pay for the researchers. Also, there occurs a lot of deaths. Dealing with the dead bodies of animals would take another money. In medical sector, animal testing may be necessary to a degree to test the safety of totally new and unidentified substances, but in cosmetic industry, there are already thousands of products released with ingredients that have gone through safety examination and got approved. There is no necessity to develop new ingredients for cosmetics as there are already lots of them. To invent more effective substances that help us to have wrinkle-free, whitened face? That is the just greed of cosmetic companies to earn more money.

Lastly, animal testing is not a good idea as they are basically different from humans. Humans and most animals used in testing (rats, rabbits, monkeys etc.), though mammals, do not share the same biological and physiological features. They have different DNA structures and metabolisms from each other. Think about chocolates. It is one of the most-loved sweets among people but it is fatal to dogs as dog’s body cannot process it as fast as humans and sometimes intoxicate them. For this reason, the test result is not reliable. Even if the result was positive and safe in the animal testing, it can be turned out that it is not to humans. What had no influence on animals may cause serious problems in humans or vice versa. Whichever the case is, one thing for sure is that animal testing cannot exactly predict the human safety.

Based on these 3 main reasons I firmly stand against the animal testing practices in cosmetic industry.