ABSTRACT
The use of animals for research purposes and especially for cosmetic efficacy testing has been a sensitive matter for several decades. Regulatory agencies and political as well as scientific communities have put constant pressure to ban the use of animals for such purposes. In Europe, this has forced the Council of the European Union to approve legislation for banning the use of animals for testing cosmetic products, starting March 2009. This implies that alternative methods require validation by the European Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (ECVAM). To date, only a few alternative testing methods have been validated for toxicological testing using reconstructed human skin models. Nevertheless, human skin equivalents, such as reconstructed human epidermis (RHE), full-thickness (FT) skin, or skin organ culture (SOC) models have already been adopted by cosmetic laboratories as alternatives to animal experimentation for quite some time. These models not only allow to comply with the demands of regulatory authorities, animal welfare organizations, and consumers but also provide a means to improve and extend our knowledge on skin biology. Moreover, they have proven to be reliable, efficient, informative, and predictive tools for screening, bioavailability, and efficacy testing of active ingredients.
