L’Oreal is now manufacturing human skin that renders testing cosmetics on animal skin completely unnecessary.
Their EpiSkin provides a tangible way to test products without torturing animals. This is good news for people, too — synthetically engineered human skin tests are more reliable than those performed on other species.
In animal cosmetics tests, innocent rabbits, dogs, monkeys and other animals are imprisoned in laboratories where they are exposed to high doses of toxic chemicals. Scientists can do anything they want to their victims without so much as administering painkillers. This skin-growing technology will spare animals the agony of at least some types of tests.
EpiSkin is made of human skin cells from donated surgical waste from circumcisions and cosmetic surgery. The cells are mixed with collagen gel, water, sugar, and amino acids. The new tissue is approximately the size of a dime, and aging is simulated via ultraviolet light.
L’Oreal’s Predictive Evaluation Center in Lyon, France has been growing and testing human skin tissue since 2011, and has grown over 100,000 human skin tissue models. Hundreds of ingredients and products have been tested with the laboratory-grown human skin.
Beyond cosmetics, lab grown skin may also revolutionize burn care.
Not only is producing skin an impressive technology that will emancipate animals from cruel laboratory skin tests, it is also a new revenue stream. L’Oreal can sell the manufactured skin to other cosmetic companies, household and chemical product makers, and pharmaceutical companies that also need to test their products.
EpiSkin’s major competitor is MarTek’s EpiDerm. MarTek makes the equivalent of two adult humans’ skins per week (sounds very Silence of the Lambs). Grown in a petri dish, EpiDerm is sold in packages of 24 tissues for $1,000. Ending the torture and suffering of animals has turned out to be quite profitable.
Now that skin can be grown, scientists will work toward building organs like livers, brains, kidneys, and more. This promising technology is so advanced that it seems like science fiction. Using synthesized organs means scientists will no longer need to infect animals with diseases, induce tumors, blind them, and torture the animals in other heinous ways, only to kill them after the experiment is complete.
Thankfully, over 30 countries are no longer testing cosmetics on animals. The Humane Cosmetics Act aims to eliminate animal testing by companies in the United States, but has yet to see a vote in Congress.
Great News if it is true. Hats off to L’Oreal.
This is wonderful news!! I applaud them!
Episkin has existed since about 1993 – 24 years ago – and L’Oreal bought it in 1997. The UK outlawed cosmetics testing on animals in 1997, but by then manufacturers had largely moved away from the practice anyway because using animals is the most expensive way of testing anything. This story does the rounds every ten years or so – here it is from 2007 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-470857/Human-skin-testing-cosmetics-grown-lab.html. The real thing that will drive animals from cosmetics testing is governments like China not requiring the tests – also, the EU could ban tests because it also bans about 1,700 different chemicals from being in cosmetics, whereas the US bans about four. As a note, most of the ingredients in all cosmetics were tested on animals, including those with ‘leaping bunny’ designation or from Lush etc – they just give a free pass to chemicals that were animal tested before some random point in the 1980s.
Way cool.
SEE; WE HUMANKIND HAVE A BRAIN; WE SHOULD USE OUR GRAY MATTER MORE OFTEN; RATHER THAN OUR WANTON BASE IMPULSES !!!
Excellent news!