L’Oréal is committed to only market products whose safety has been evaluated according to rigorous and ethical protocols. The goal is to prevent our consumers from experiencing any adverse effects from the product’s use. Traditionally, the safety assessment of products and ingredients was done by means of animal testing.

However, since the 1980s, L’Oréal believes that the future of safety evaluation lies in the development of alternative, “predictive” strategies. This approach is built on the substantial scientific progress being made in the fields of reconstructed skin models, molecular modeling and also high-performance data processing. It allows us to exploit all of the data that the Group has been accumulated over the course of a century, representing over 50 000 ingredients.

These new strategies and the considerable research efforts behind them have paid off: in 1989, L’Oréal was able to end all testing of its products on animals, without making our products any less safe. Since March 2013, the Group has taken another decisive step: The Group no longer tests on animal, anywhere in the world, and does not delegate this task to others. An exception could be made if regulatory authorities required it for safety or regulatory purposes.

Thanks to our advances in alternative methods, our partnerships with research institutes worldwide and the extraordinary determination of our teams, L’Oréal has entered the “predictive” era of forecasting an ingredient’s safety & efficacy before it has been synthesized. This ambition, which is supported by the international scientific community known as “toxicology of the 21st century”, is manifest in our laboratories’ efforts and fuels our innovation.

More than 30 years ago L’Oréal chartered a new course that today allows us to innovate for beauty around the world without recourse to animal testing.

Visit the website for Episkin, our business unit for sales of reconstructed tissue models