Campaigning To End All Animal Testing

Lush is a campaigning company. That means we use our stores, staff and online presence to campaign on issues we care about. Here are some of the campaigns we have run as part of our fight against animal testing.

Keeping Animals Out of Reach

We have actively campaigned to keep animals out of European legislation called REACH – which is the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals. While we agree that testing materials for safety is a good thing, what we don’t agree with is subjecting millions of animals to cruel and scientifically invalid experiments to do so. 

We have campaigned in our stores to urge the European Union to only use non-animal tests to determine the safety of ingredients. Through our stores we actively lobbied MEPs and took part in a protest outside the European parliament. 

Since REACH became law, at least 4.2 million animals have been used in three categories of experiments: repeated-dose toxicity, developmental toxicity, and reproductive toxicity. It is outrageous that these archaic tests are still being used. We continue to call on the EU and the UK government to get animals out of REACH to stop many millions more animals suffering in the coming decades.

End Lethal Dose Animal Tests

Lethal Dose 50 (LD50) is one of the oldest, cruellest and most redundant animal tests. Developed nearly 100 years ago, it involves force feeding a substance to a group of animals until 50% of them are dead. This is then determined to be the lethal dose level for that substance. But of course, because every species metabolises substances differently, it does little to show what a harmful dose is to humans. So why, when there have been so many technological advances in the past 100 years, are some scientists still using this crude and cruel test – especially when a modern effective non animal test has been developed that could replace it immediately.

We have campaigned to bring an end to LD50 animal tests and promote the better science developed by the animal-free lab XCellR8. Watch these videos to find out more.