Non-animal testing

L'Oréal, the international cosmetics firm, has joined the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to help advance the EPA's ToxCast system for high-throughput chemical screening. Twenty chemicals found in L'Oréal's products will be tested by ToxCast to establish whether the system can predict the chemicals' toxicity. ToxCast has been validated using hundreds of chemicals already, but until now no chemicals used in cosmetics have been tested.

It is hoped that ToxCast will eventually reduce the number of time-consuming, animal-intensive toxicity tests currently used by the EPA. L'Oréal has committed $1.2 million (£750,000) to the EPA's Office of Research and Development to fund the work.