Tuesday, March 12, 2013

E.U. Bans Cosmetics With Animal-Tested Ingredients

Even before the new rule was officially announced, the cosmetics company L’Oréal, which is based in France, said it would respect the ban and “no longer sell in Europe any finished product with an ingredient that was tested on animals” after Monday.

But other representatives of the European industry, worth about €70 billion, or $91 billion, annually, criticized the commission for putting the ban into effect before alternatives existed for some of the most complex tests.

“Europe’s idea is to put more pressure on other parts of the world to end animal testing, but the science doesn’t match that political timetable,” said Colin Mackay, a spokesman for Cosmetics Europe, a trade association.

And there were warnings on Monday that the ban still left a loophole. Shortly after the announcement, Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, a Socialist lawmaker from Germany who a decade ago helped to steer a measure through the European Parliament that resulted in the 2004 ban, said companies still could use ingredients from tests on animals as long as the tests were carried out for non-cosmetic products like pharmaceuticals or chemicals.


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