Chinese Regulations Take Away Companies' Cruelty-Free Label. Will It End Soon?
I was browsing the PETA website, when I came across an interesting article headline. It detailed new developments in the regulation policy in China for foreign products and animal testing. The original controversy started a few years ago when several cosmetics companies lost their cruelty-free status when they decided to sell their products overseas in China. Among these brands were Estee Lauder, Avon and Mary Kay.
If you're not too familiar with animal testing as a practice, I found that this article summed it up pretty well, saying:
When a cosmetic company wants to use a new ingredient, they need to test it to make sure that it is safe for human usage [...] No, it doesn’t involve giving a mouse a makeover. Chemicals are rubbed on shaved skin or dripped into eyes to test for irritation responses. The animals are conscious and given no form of pain relief during this treatment. These tests can result in blindness, sores, bleeding and death for the animals. When the test has been finished, all animals are killed.
It would seem that China is one of the last hold-outs on the animal testing issue, with many countries--including the entire EU, Norway, New Zealand, India and many more-- making it illegal to sell products that test on animals or contain ingredients that have been tested on animals. Chinese regulation of these products is different than in the United States. They require that tests on animals be done for cosmetic products, certain ingredients for cosmetic products, and "special-use" items such as hair dye and and deodorant. (find more info on that here)
This is a complicated dilemma for vegans and those who want to support cruelty-free skincare and makeup, because although the physical products that the animal rights activists are using here in the States have not been tested on animals, the company itself has betrayed the idea behind cruelty-free creation by allowing others to test their products in their country of sale. In fact, some companies have actually gotten in trouble for selling the same products (that were tested on animals) in countries where animal testing has been banned, because they failed to make separate products for China, which is legally what they are required to do.
This is similar to a problem that some cruelty-free shoppers have with brands such as Urban Decay, who individually does not test on animals, but is owned by a parent company that does. Although, I do believe these scenarios differ in that, the smaller companies that are bought by larger corporations do not necessarily get a say in who they are owned by, and whether or not that corporation conducts animal testing. Companies that do subject themselves to animal testing for the sake of business in China, however, do have a choice.
SO what's the solution? PETA thinks they may have found one. They teamed up with the company IIVS, or the Institution for In Vitro Sciences, and gave them a grant so that they could work with Chinese governments and change their views on animal testing for cosmetic goods. With the help of the IIVS and their team, China agreed to its first non-animal drug testing, and they have also significantly reduced the requirements of their laws, meaning that not necessarily all products will need to be registered and tested. This is huge news for anyone who used to love certain brands who are only considered not cruelty-free because of Chinese sales.
Being the inquisitive and horrendously unscientific person that I am, I wanted to look deeper into the concept of the phototoxicity assay that the IIVS mentions on their website. I wanted to know exactly what it was tested on, its accuracy, and if there was any controversy surrounding the methods.
So, in layman's terms, the measure of phototoxicity is a measure of the reaction of skin to the chemical being tested when exposed to UV light. If the chemical absorbs the UV light, there's an adverse reaction on the skin that looks like a very severe sunburn. If that burn occurs, the chemical is deemed to be dangerous for human use.
Now, the tests in this In Vitro assays are not done on human or animal skin, because that would completely negate the concept of an "alternative method." Instead, this is what I found on the subject:
This assay consists of the immortalized mouse fibroblast cell line, Balb/c 3T3 and is based on a comparison of the cytotoxicity of a chemical when tested in the presence and in the absence of exposure to a non-cytotoxic dose of simulated solar light. Cytotoxicity in this test is expressed as a concentration-dependent reduction of the uptake of the vital dye Neutral Red when measured 24 hours after treatment with the test chemical and irradiation [3]. The test chemical together with the irradiation may alter the cell surface and in effect may result in a decreased uptake and binding of the Neutral Red Dye. Differences in this uptake can be measured with a spectrophotometer, which allows in essence the distinction and quantification between viable, damaged or dead cells.
So, in this case, red dye acts as a marker for the reaction in a single cell from a mouse that can be copied and used again and again. This way, millions of animals are saved the torture of being beaten, burned and poisoned in the name of "science."
Later on in the report, there was even the suggestion of using "reconstituted 3D human skin models" to conduct these toxicity tests. This would be ideal, as animal skins behave differently than human skin anyway. In fact, this article states that allergy tests on certain animals can only predict reactions 72% of the time, and allergy tests on animals overall are only 90% accurate. For that reason, people with allergies (more than 50 million people in America alone) should avoid animal-tested products, especially if they are particularly sensitive to their allergen.
In the name of the safety of animals everywhere and sufferers of allergies, it makes sense that we continue to develop these alternative forms of testing product safety. I hope that China continues to open their mind to cruelty-free testing in their cosmetic markets.