LUSH Against Animal Testing

LUSH is a cosmetic company that is well known for heavily emphasizing the importance of being environmentally friendly. All of their products are organic and have labels explaining what ingredients were used and gives a brief description of the person who made the product themselves. On the products’ labels LUSH also points out to their customers that their products are strictly made without any sort of animal testing. So if animals are not being used to assure these products are safe to be used on living beings then how are these products tested? Well, there are alternatives to testing products and either people do not know of these alternatives or they do not care to switch their testing methods for the sake of animals.

Seeing that most of their customers do not understand the significance of using alternative methods instead of conducting animal testing LUSH took on the challenge of showing what animal testing would look like if done on humans. In London, LUSH set up a “Live Human Testing” demonstration in their shop on Regent Street. Jacqueline Traide, a performance artist, volunteered to spend ten hours enduring the “testing” to help LUSH get their point across.

All that was done to Traide in the demonstration was not real and did not cause her pain whatsoever, but seeing what kinds of things mankind does to animals had a crucial impact on the audience. The overall response of the audience was positive though some protested against the fact that a woman was used for the demonstrations claiming that she looked as if she was overly sexual.

LUSH responded to the negative feedback concerning the woman by explaining that they felt using a woman would create more of an impact since most of their customers are women.

The company has been fighting against animal cruelty for 30 years and plans to continue to encourage people to stand with them in the fight against animal testing. LUSH found that many people think that animal testing is something that is legally required for cosmetic products, but the truth is that there are many different ways to go about testing these products that do not include animal testing.

Three-dimensional human skin models can be used to replace rabbits for skin irritation, genetic mutations, and other harmful effects. By educating people on the alternatives that can be used to take the place of animal testing LUSH hopes other companies will follow in their footsteps and fight against animal testing.