Abstract

The seventh amendment to the Cosmetics Directive has laid down a daunting challenge to the Cosmetics Industry in Europe: a graduated ban on the use of animals for determining the safety of finished cosmetic products and the individual ingredients used incosmetics. The challenge for both the cosmetic companies and the regulators responsible for assuring consumer safety is the development of hithertounavailable in vitro methods that can accurately identifypotential human risk. Significant progress has been made over the past few years in the development of test systems capable of replacing animal models. Theaim of this article is to highlight some of the newest alternative approaches for determining acute LD50s, skinsensitization, and repeat dose systemic toxicity.