Stop Cosmetics Testing on Animals

We can win a victory for animals in the U.S., too. - sign the petition here and help.

It’s no secret that the U.S. is lagging behind other countries that have banned cruel and archaic tests on animals for cosmetics and replaced them with more reliable, humane methods. The European Union, Israel, and India have all embraced modern testing methods and ended all tests on animals for cosmetics and personal-care products. Here at home, PETA has been meeting with legislators, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and numerous corporations for many months to ensure that tests on animals for cosmetics will never be required in the U.S. But a bill currently before a congressional committee threatens to make tests on animals for some cosmetics ingredients mandatory.

Proponents of the Safe Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Act of 2013 claim to be acting to protect public health. But the tests on animals that the bill calls for have proved time and time again to be unreliable indicators of how a product will affect humans, because animals’ physiologies are not mirror images of our own. Modern methods include testing chemicals on donated human tissue or skin cultures grown from human cells, and there are dozens of other scientifically advanced techniques. The tests are not only more reliable but also usually less expensive, and they don’t require that animals be poisoned, burned, or blinded. But if the Safe Cosmetics and Personal Care Products Act of 2013 passes as it is currently written, a just-published paper reports that as many as 11.5 million animals would be killed in cruel product tests in the first 10 years alone.
And the bill isn’t the only danger that animals used for cosmetics testing are facing. The cosmetics industry trade group, the Personal Care Products Council, has been negotiating for months with the FDA on possible changes to regulatory testing requirements. The most recent draft of the proposed regulations, if accepted, may also open the door to more tests on animals.