“How many rabbits does Revlon blind for beauty’s sake?” -Henry Spira, Animal Rights Activist                    This statement was made over 30 years ago, and today it could not be any more true. In fact, the circumstances are much worse than they seem. Everyday, thousands of animals around the world are thrown to the ground, beaten, blinded, and even skinned alive in beauty’s name.

In most European and Asian countries, some of the cruelest and most painful experiments are conducted on animals to satisfy government-mandated testing requirements. In these tests, animals such as dogs, cats, rabbits and monkeys are forced to eat or inhale mass doses of the tested substance. In most cases, this leads to abdominal pain, paralysis, swelling and ulceration of the eyes and skin, seizures, convulsions, and bleeding of the eyes, nose, mouth and genitals followed by being poisoned to death and in some cases even being killed by the experimenter. In the United States, such testing is not required, however, several major cosmetic companies insist on partaking in the horrendous experimentation. Studies show that 81 percent of the experiments conducted exceed the animals pain threshold. These invasive and demeaning experiments can especially be viewed as questionable as most do not recognize its significance to humans.

Another problem with animal testing conducted today has ever been properly scientifically validated. Which calls into question reliability, accuracy and most importantly the relevance of the tests. In the Draize eye and skin irritation tests, rabbits were immobilized with full body restraints while a white substance was smeared into their eyes or onto an area of shaved skin. Several later studies revealed that the Draize tests over predicted the effects that could be seen in the human eye and that the test does not reflect the eye irritation hazard for humans. It was concluded that the data collected was insubstantial.

Despite the biased claims by scientists who swear that non-animal testing is irrelevant, the reality is these tests and their results are not validated and will always be questionable