Look who's paying for our hunger for beauty!

At what price is beauty got? When I ask this question, I don’t mean the price one pays personally by starving to lose weight, or runs for hours to build muscles or get haircuts and surgeries, to look more beautiful. I am talking about the price others have to pay for us to look beautiful.

For many years now, groups across the world have been drawing attention to the inhuman and cruel treatment meted out by the cosmetic industry to animals such as rabbits, mice, and guinea pigs so that we can look stunning. Promotion of Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) enlisted celebrities who posed in furs made from the millions of baby seals in Canadian waters and baby whales in Japanese seas that were clubbed to death. Some of these baby seals were less than a month old and could not even swim. Year after year, they are butchered mercilessly. In Denmark and Japan, the seas turn red with the blood of whales when men gleefully harpoon them and drag their brains out in the yearly whaling season. This is used as a base for the oil used in the perfume industry.

And rabbits? No one is quite sure why rabbits became a favourite for experimentation. Maybe because their eyes are super sensitive to light, and they do not have tear ducts or that they are easy to capture and keep in captivity; breed fast giving a never ending supply for new tests. So, they are clamped in unnatural surroundings with loud music, wrecking their nerves and chemicals are poured into their eyes to see at what point they are blinded or onto their skins to test the level of toxicity in a cream or shampoo, which might kill them. For those that survive these horrors, only more brutality awaits. They are either hacked or bludgeoned to death.

Thankfully, this is not the only way. Over the years activists have urged scientists to develop more humane tests which have seen the light of day. According to Beauty Without Cruelty (BWC), human skin equivalent tests, EpiDermTM and EpiSkinTM, have been scientifically validated and accepted, to completely replace animal tests for skin corrosion and irritation, and SkinEthic has also been approved to replace testing on animals for skin irritation. The Bovine Corneal Opacity and Permeability (BCOP) test and the Isolated Chicken Eye (ICE) test have been validated and accepted as replacements for live animals to check eye irritancy. The cell-based Fluorescein Leakage Test, while not a 1:1 replacement for the rabbit test, can also be used as part of a step-wise strategy to considerably reduce the number of animals subjected to eye irritancy testing. Most recently, scientists in Japan have developed a new in-vitro eye irritation testing method using human cornea cells which may be a promising replacement in the future.

In addition to these available alternatives, cruelty-free companies can simply avoid using new ingredients that require new test data. There are thousands of such ingredients available that have long historical evidence of success.

In fact companies like Lush and Body Shop have become huge successes in spite of never testing on animals or using ingredients tested on them. The EU has had a ban in place for many years but major companies circumvent these by not testing the final product, but saying nothing of the raw materials used and tested elsewhere. However, China and India are amongst the biggest culprits. Can we afford to be silent and continue using these products?

If we claim to love the cow, to not want to kill animals like the Jains, the Buddhists and the vegetarians, we must also stop using products that lead to untold cruelty to millions of animals.

Join the campaign of the Humane Society. Stop smearing your face and body with the blood of innocent animals.

Mallika sarabhai
The writer is a noted danseuse and social  activist