Cosmetic Experimentation is entirely cruel and entirely unnecessary. There exist many viable alternatives, including but not limited to the in-vitro testing of a product or product ingredient on human blood or urine, the use of human cadaver tissue, human tissue donated by plastic surgeons when there is an excess, human skin cultures grown in laboratories, human volunteers, and many others. An estimated 300,000 animals die every day in cosmetic experiments. These animals include, but again, are not limited to: mice, rats, rabbits, guinea pigs, cats, dogs, monkeys, sheep, frogs, fish and horses. They die in painful and grotesque experiments such as the Draize or LD50 tests. The Draize irritancy test for eyes or skin is a procedure in which a rabbit's (usually albino) head is placed in a wooden stocks, their eyes held open with clips or a section of their fur shaved off and scraped until raw skin is exposed. Then, caustic chemicals are deposited in the eyes or on the raw skin and the effects of the chemicals upon the rabbit's tissue are observed. These chemicals, being caustic, will often cause anything from redness and swelling to necrosis and blindness. The LD50 test is similarly blood-curdling. A large amount of lab animals (usually rats and mice) are placed in a sealed container or in stocks. There, they are forced to ingest by gas, liquid or in solid form a chemical substance. They will continue to be force-fed this substance until at least half of the population of lab animals used are dead. LD50 stands for medial Lethal Dose, 50 being the percentage of animals that need to die until the experiment can have been proved conclusive. The number of mice or rat deaths are not usually recorded, as the amount that die is so monstrously high.

None of these animals are in any way genetically similar enough to humans to provide researchers with conclusive results. What might work on a rabbit might not work on a human, in other words (or vice versa). These alternatives, however, are much more genetically similar to humans (rabbit vs. actual human skin?) in addition to being much cheaper to produce and much more morally sound to use. In addition to this, there are many natural ingredients that have been used by humans for hundreds of years and have been proven to work; natural herbs and extracts like mint or rosemary whose purchase would stimulate agriculture across the United States as opposed to feeding the pockets of the large corporations that produce chemicals to be used in cosmetic experimentation.

Please show your support for this petition, which will, once it has garnered enough signatures, be sent to Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Chuck Schumer as well as Representative Maloney, all Congresspeople representing New York State and City in an effort to sway them to support a bill created by the F.A.C.E. organization to end cosmetic experimentation in the United States. According to the Vivsection Information Network, one mouse is killed every 12 seconds. One fish every 64 seconds. One rat every 103 seconds. One bird every 4 minutes. One sheep every 13 minutes. One rabbit every 35 minutes. One amphibian (frogs, toads, salamanders) every 36 minutes. One guinea pig every 38 minutes. One dog every 91 minutes. One hamster every 2 hours. One livestock animal (horses, cows) every 2.5 hours.

The European Union has already taken the step of introducing a bill to prohibit animal experimentation called the "Cosmetics Directive". India has mandated that animals can only be used for expeirments for the advancement of medical science. Please sign this petition. This is senseless slaughter. As Jane Goodall put it in an editorial in the Times on March 17th, 2012, “The thought of deliberate experimentation on non-consenting humans rightly horrifies us. But is it really so different when we do this to other animals?”