Our consumers’ health and safety have always been a top priority for L’Oréal Group. The defense of the animal cause is just as important to us.
Developed more than 30 years ago, Episkin, L’Oréal’s pioneering proprietary reconstructed skin technology, provides a reliable and viable alternative to animal testing. By reproducing the structure of human skin and replicating the conditions for product application, in just a few hours the technology can predict the safety of an ingredient or formula, enabling performance comparisons well before it has even been clinically tested.
Well before animal testing became a regulatory or societal concern, L'Oréal had developed, in 1979, alternative methods based on a technology that was unique at the time – the reconstruction of human skin.
By 1989, L’Oréal had definitively stopped testing products on animals, 14 years before this was required by law for products. Beyond skin models, L'Oréal also uses a great number of predictive evaluation tools that avoid animal use, such as molecular modelling, expert toxicology systems and imaging techniques.
Episkin is currently the only reconstituted skin technology that is approved by the European Commission.
Each year, L’Oréal’s predictive evaluation centre in France produces around 150,000 units of reconstructed tissue.
3 Episkin centers around the world:
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