How are products not tested on animals verified for safety?

One example that comes to mind are the “green”/greenwashed soaps and shampoos at the grocery store. Some say “Not tested on animals”. Are they tested at all? If so, how?

Is this just a marketing gimmick? Do regular cosmetic items actually undergo animal testing, human trials, the whole shebang, etc. before going to market?

I take it the tests are somewhat less involved for a bar of soap than for a new drug (or are they?), but I also wonder if companies are allowed to mix together random vats of ingredients and sell them as commercial products without somehow first testing their safety.

(ETA: Inspired by the thread “May vegans have flu shots?”)

Cosmetics and other consumer products are regulatedby the FDA in the USA and by their equivalents in other countries. My experience is in pharmaceutical testing, so I’ll leave it to others to go into further details about what testing is required, or let you read the link yourself.

This is somewhat of an educated WAG, but my understanding of the not tested on animals claim on consumer products is that those products may not have undergone animal testing because they are made up of ingredients which are already known to be safe, and that is because other companies in the past have done the testing already. So HypothEthical Shampoo wasn’t tested on animals, but essentially identical products with different FDA-approved colouring and odour were, back in 1957 or something.

There are lists of ingredients with known chemical properties which can be used in consumer products without the extensive testing required of a new molecule. For example, nearly every shampoo on the planet contains sodium lauyl sulfate, so making a new shampoo with SLS in it wouldn’t require animal testing. Dyes and perfumes are generally also known pre-approved substances, which is why you’ll see things like FD&C Blue 1 or FD&C Red 3 on products.

Sure. They test them on their customers. :smiley:

Well, that particular product isn’t tested on animals, but the ingredients (unless they were previously on the GRAS list) were at one time tested on animals.

For example, you can buy “animal friendly” zinc oxide diaper rash formula because that particular product hadn’t been tested on animals. However, zinc oxide itself had been repeatedly tested over and over again on animals.

I am also not too sure whether most cosmetics are in fact tested on animals, or only new formulations. Animal testing is extremely expensive, and I would assume if you don’t have to do it, you’ll do your best to avoid it. We don’t see the “not tested on animal” claim because most of the “Not Tested on Animal” agencies certify the entire company and not individual products.

Besides, a company might change a formulation, so they would have problems with labeling: “Not Tested on Animals”, no wait, “This Batch Was”, but “Not This Batch”.

See Physical Science | HowStuffWorks, and pay special attention to this section: Physical Science | HowStuffWorks

To me, the whole “Not Tested on Animal” claim seems tainted because these companies are still benefiting on animal testing.

That’s always been my issue with it too. Somewhere down the line, ingredient X was tested on animals, because it’s really the only way to ensure that applying it to skin (for example) won’t immediately burn your skin off and/or kill you. So HypothEthical company didn’t pay for the testing themselves; that doesn’t make their product superior, it just means they’re riding other people’s coattails!

Personally, I’m for animal testing, because really, what’s the alternative? “Here’s a random molecule we got from a test tube filled with all kinds of stuff. It might cure cancer. Or it might turn you green, make your grow spare limbs or cause a slow suffering death. We don’t know, because you’ll be the first to consume it! Wanna try?”

Somehow I don’t think many people will take that offer…!

I think the point of a lot of these companies is essentially, “We don’t see the point in making animals suffer by testing and retesting stuff when we know its effects already. We know what sunflower oil and beeswax and lanolin and cocoa butter do to animals, so we don’t need to test this lip balm we made from those ingredients on them.”

How would the animals be suffering at retesting stuff we already know works? Presumably if it hurts them, we wouldn’t consider it okay to be used on people.

Random thoughts:

  1. The FDA has a natural foods exemption. If it’s found in nature, it doesn’t need to be tested. It only needs to be tested if the compound was created in a lab (e.g. unnatural.) That’s why, if you go to a health food store, there’s stuff like shark cartilage, krill extract, and tuna liver oil.

  2. There are alternate methods of testing, such as computer simulation, plant testing, and human volunteer.

Really? Seems to me like a lot of things found in nature are toxic or lethal. I’m surprised.

Well, “it doesn’t hurt the animal” doesn’t mean the study to find that out isn’t uncomfortable or distressing to the animal. Or perhaps even fatal - maybe it’s required to autopsy the test animals afterward to confirm that the test substance didn’t cause internal damage to the animal’s organs or something like this. Even for topical applications - OK, we determined that sunflower oil is harmless, but how would YOU like to have all your hair shaved off, and have it slathered all over you several times a day for weeks?

That said, the major reason for not repeating tests is probably to avoid unneeded expense. As someone already observed, animal testing is expensive.

Exactly. Animal testing of cosmetics doesn’t mean that they’re applying mascara to bunnies’ eyelashes, and the rabbits look in the mirror and fill out questionnaires. It means the animals are having substances put into their eyes and mouths, and on their skin, to determine what dosages will damage tissues or cause other problems.

There is a law that limits the FDA jurisdiction on “nutritional supplements”, but these supplements need to be on the GRAS list. And, this only applies to “nutritional supplements” and not cosmetics.

There can be no human testing without first going through various stages of testing, and that includes animal testing.

I’ve heard a lot from vegans that we could do computer simulations, but as a computer expert, I’ll tell you that is impossible due to the absolute complexity of living organisms.

Plant testing won’t work since plant metabolisms are just too different.

I can’t say for certain, but all new compounds require animal testing.

But we have gotten very good at biochemical modeling, and know a lot more about body chemistry and the various pH levels of the different bodily environments. That allows us to predict, with a high degree of confidence, what the impact will be of mixing two different chemical compounds. We also know a lot more about how our pain and histamine receptors work and how they are likely to behave when a wide range of chemical compounds come into contact with them.

In much the same way that we can do aerodynamic simulations on a computer now, instead of building a great wind tunnel and pumping in vapor trails to see how they stream over an automobile chassis.

Granted, computer modeling isn’t 100% accurate, but then again animal testing left much to be desired as well. I wonder how many time a rabbit was able to advise its human testers that one particular shampoo was tolerable when squirted into its eyes, while another resulted in a mildly unpleasant tingle. Scientists had to rely on the most obvious of indicators, such as the eye turning red or causing obvious duress for the animal. Test results that are inferred from an animal’s behavior probably aren’t worth much to begin with.

I’ve had cosmetics (well cleaning and moisturizing agents of various sorts) tested on me, so I know there is human testing available. And for one of the products I did have an odd reaction to it, so that sort of thing is valuable. In some cases they do regular testing, i.e. the human guinea pig uses the product as intended to see both whether there will be an adverse reaction but also whether the intended use is efficacious. In other cases they test only for adverse reactions by doing skin patch tests on your back.

I worked for a while in a building where sheep were kept for animal testing of inhalers. Those sheep had never seen the sun; the pen where they lived was too dark to read. Their caretaker would carry a small lantern to write by.

Then again, the company that owned them wasn’t particularly humane to its human workers either…

That analogy is flawed. First, because air is a gas, not a massive conglomeration of molecular machinery the way an organism is. Much simpler to model, because it is a much simpler substance. And second, we just don’t have the knowledge yet to do it right. New details of how cells work and what they contain are still being discovered; even if we had computers good enough we still couldn’t run a truly accurate simulation because we just don’t have the data to build one. We can’t simulate how, say, an enzyme will react to a drug if we have no idea the enzyme exists.

Also, besides being inhumane inflicting unnecessary suffering or deprivation on the animals is bad science. An animal, or a person for than matter reacts differently while under stress.

Speaking from the pharmaceutical perspective, computer modelling really won’t do any good whatsoever. We really don’t understand what most of the stuff in a cell is, how it works and why, and how it interacts with everything else in it. We’ve mapped the genome, but that’s like looking atthis map and then trying to understand the traffic patterns, tv-watching habits, grocery habits and hair length of every person in every city and town in the country. We just don’t have that information.

There is a lot that can be learned about a drug/cosmetic molecule in a test tube, for sure. You can study what it dissolves in, you can expose it to light, acid, base, or even certain biological conditions like simulated blood or stomach acid, and see if it breaks apart or reacts with stuff to make something new. You can see how it will react with potential ingredients for a tablet or capsule, and get a fairly reasonable estimate of how long it will take to release the drug from the tablet when put in stomach acid.

But you can’t know whether it will kill someone if they consume it.

Animal testing is generally done for the major toxicological studies…will a rat die if it receives 1mg of the molecule? 1 nanogram? 50 grams? What kind of effects will it have on the rat’s DNA? Will it cause tumours to develop, or affect the reproduction cycle of the rat? Will offspring be born with complications? If the molecule has serious effects on a rat, that will often kill any potential it has to ever make it to human testing. Sure, rats aren’t the same as humans, but our cells, our DNA are close enough to be able to tell if the drug is a mutagen or teratogen.

As I understand it, further studies on the metabolism of the drug will happen in other animal models - dogs or primates. Only then (and years of studies, review of results and regulatory approval) can the drug be tested in healthy humans, and then eventually in symptomatic humans, etc until it reaches the market.

There have been failures - most people remember thalidomide as an example - but changes are made to they system after failures are discovered, and the system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best thing we have. Either we continue to test on animals, and eliminate 99.9% of the potential drug molecules from ever making it into a human because they are too toxic or ineffective, or we test everything on humans right away.

Will you* volunteer your child for testing? Yourself? And if your child dies because “Oops, turns out 1ng of this stuff causes heart failure…we thought it would cure acne…”, would that be ok with you? I’d much rather a rat died to find that out than a child.

Alternatively, we stop making cosmetics (which I could argue is a viable option). But do we stop making pharmaceuticals? Do we stop trying to cure the diseases that plague our species, stop trying to heal the wounds we suffer from? Some might say we should…let nature take it’s course. Frankly, I’m not willing to do that.

*hypothetical you, I’m not calling out anyone in this thread

To be clear: I don’t think all testing that has ever been done on animals has necessarily been valid. I support rigourous control and oversight of animal testing facilities, I support data review and selecting studies involving the fewest animals as possible to obtain the necessary data, as well as humane conditions for the animals (as much as possible within the scope of the study being done). I don’t think computer simulations will replace animal testing in my lifetime (and I’m in my 20s), because I don’t think the complexities of human biochemistry and toxicology will be completely understood within that time frame. I could be wrong - it would be great if I were - but even then, computers are only as smart as the person programming them. I’d still want to give the pill to a rat to see what happens before taking it myself!

Poor darkened sheep. :frowning:

I heard that they are instead tested on PETA members caught in the wild.