The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and L’Oréal cosmetics company just announced a new research collaboration. The $1.2 million initiative will test the effectiveness of ToxCast, a chemical toxicity forecaster, in determining whether specific ingredients in cosmetics are safe for human use. ToxCast will help cosmetics companies save time and money on product safety testing, and may ultimately make testing cosmetics on animals obsolete!

EPA’s Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest was quoted in an agency press release: “EPA is pleased to collaborate with L’Oréal in the pursuit of improved methods for chemical testing. Using state-of-the-art methods, we hope to show that products can be proven safe for the consumer without the use of animals.”

L’Oréal will fund the research and provide relevant cosmetics sector data to help expand the types of substances assessed by ToxCast, and to calibrate the new, animal-free testing method. In exchange, the cosmetics company will look for ToxCast to provide predictive results on the safety of its product inputs.

While some animal rights advocates applaud the new partnership as a step in the right direction, others believe L’Oréal could be doing more to eliminate animal testing. What do you think?

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