Since I was a kid I always thought it meant applying makeup or skin care products on animals topically. But what is the real act behind animal testing (cosmetics)?
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There’s a few things to understand here
1. The vast majority of materials involved in cosmetics have not changed in decades, and it is more about reformulation of the same stuff over and over. If you see a company say “we don’t test on animals!” then you can typically turn over the bottle and find very common ingredients on the backside. They don’t test on animals *right now* because the ingredients were already tested on animals decades ago.
2. Animal testing is both time consuming and expensive. There’s strict guidelines on how it can be done and it requires specialized training.
3. Scientists are not, yknow, psychopaths. They aren’t torturing animals for no reason.
Safety documentation is required for anything that a human might touch. However, since point 1 above is a thing the vast majority of test cases are things that have been found to be safe and therefore testing is unnecessary or there is a very small chance of a negative reaction. It’s more for novel (brand new) formulations that it would be an issue, using chemicals that are not typically used in that process. In that case it comes down to harm reduction; yes it is terrible to have to determine the LD(50) of a chemical, but those regulations were written in blood. There’s alternative methods that can be used *up to a point* and they are used where they can be used, but sometimes there just isn’t any way around it.
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