NEWS AND COMMENT: The European Union through the European Chemicals Agency (ECA) have insisted that a German chemicals company, Symrise, conduct animal tests on two ingredients that are only used in cosmetics. They made this demand because of a set of EU rules concerning the registration, authorisation, evaluation and restriction of chemicals.
It’s in the news because the UK was the first country to ban animal testing for cosmetics in 1998. However, the UK’s Home Office has indicated that it will align with this EU ruling. This would be a dramatically retrograde step in animal welfare.
As a consequence, dozens of cosmetic companies have written to the Home Secretary asking her for a guarantee that there will be no necessity to test beauty products on animals. In all, 70 companies including Waitrose, Boots, Avon, Unilever and others have voiced concerns.
They warned the Home Secretary that the ECA “is now requiring some widely used cosmetic ingredients (and ingredients used in many other types of consumer products) to be tested on hundreds of thousands of animals”.
These companies are concerned that the UK will align with this policy. The companies stated that “It would now appear that the UK is choosing to follow this retrograde approach, including for ingredients used solely in cosmetics and with a history of safe use and manufacture.”
The decision ignores the great advances that have taken place in science and technology to avoid animal testing. There are now non-animal methodologies which can be used to test the safety of products to ensure that they fully comply with UK and EU regulations.
The UK government’s declared policy after leaving the EU was to improve animal welfare because they said that they felt constrained by EU regulations. The UK government thought that they could do better now that they are freed of those regulations. This latest news flies in the face of those intentions.
A Home Office spokesman said that there had been no change in legislation and that the ban on using animals for the testing of finished cosmetic products remains in force.
Comment: this is typical of the EU. The Eurocrats are a bunch of anally-retentive, closed-minded idiots.
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