When a lot of modern chemicals were developed, it was the Victorian period of time and one of the
things that the Victorians had a lot of was coal tar and they had a lot of coal tar because street
lights were lit with gas and that was extracted from the coal and therefore they had a lot of coal
tar as a by-product and it was free, so if you were a research chemist you could get a lot of
that. What happened then was that people developed all sorts of chemicals so some for example modern
fragrance materials like coumarin were developed from coal tar but more interestingly for everyone,
modern dyes stuff, azo dyes and other dyes were developed from coal tar. So when you look at
Queen Victoria, sitting there in purple, that was one of the first ever new dye stuffs and it was
incredibly expensive and that's why you know as a queen you wore it and then they they started to
develop through the First World War other colours so you could dye curtains and carpets and bedding
and clothes and it wasn't very long before some bright spark took carpet dyes and started to dye
people's hair with it. And the problem with that was it was very very allergic people had dreadful
reactions to it, their tongues would swell they would have asphyxiate and die which was not good or they
would just get dreadful allergic reactions and itch and you know and be in a bad state for
several days, but that didn't stop people doing it because they did like to have their hair coloured.
And the problem with these dyes as well is that they seem, because they were very tiny molecules they could pass through the skin and into the bloodstream,
so basically when they checked people who had had their hair dyed recently, they could find traces of the dye in their urine so when
they had a wee they could find the dye stuff for up to 24 hours after having their hair dyed.
Now they're tests on people, when they started to test it on animals they really couldn't agree whether it had
any negative effect at all so there were lots of, and have still been, lots and lots of tests
on animals over the years and still this material is used so here we've got a series of tests then that aren't
quite up to the job and it's not surprising really because you wouldn't expect rubbing a bit of dye
stuff on a hamster or guinea pig and then seeing what happens to them to be a very good model for a human being.
In the modern world, well when I first started my career, at that time finished cosmetics
were tested on animals. So an eyeshadow, a lipstick, a shampoo, they would go through a series of routine tests on animals.
That wasn't really very nice and quite often very cruel, so we started to come up with a standard that
all cosmetic companies could join to stop the testing of finished products on animals and it
became a huge issue and many many people wrote to cosmetic companies and basically testing of
cosmetics on animals finished cosmetics animals on a cruel way or a kind way all stopped, so that was
a great success, great success. Still when I had to look at it and think well we may not be testing
the finished goods, but we are still testing the raw materials so they were still taking the raw
materials and they were having a look at them on animals, so we came up with this new rule, if you like which
said if you're testing on animals we won't buy from you. One of the most exciting things during the
last government was that they banned testing on animals for cosmetic purposes that included
raw materials and we had just thought we had won that, so it was all over, everything will be
cruelty-free, you never have to ask again or look again to see if something was cruelty free.
Sadly, a new set of legislation came in from Europe called the registration evaluation and authorisation of chemicals and this
legislation meant that they would be screening all materials for their safety and many of those tests
would be on animals. Now our attitude here is that the best way of seeing if something is safe or not, is
for it to have had a long history of safe use. So if you take rosemary, people have been picking rosemary
and popping it in their food or making teas after it washing their faces with it, for at least 500
years. If you take henna, henna's been used for 2,000 years at least; people have rolled their
babies in it, they've they've eaten it in Morocco, it has an extremely long history of safe use. So
having something with a very safe long history of use is the way we tend to work. So the situation we
have now with cosmetics, is that the raw materials, where you could guarantee that they weren't going
to be tested on animals, now even well-established things could be tested on animals. So Reach has
started, Reach is a 3-year program and it is started and when it became legislation we took a big lorry
load of horse dung and we put it outside the European Parliament English made us feel slightly
better but didn't save any animals lives. So this means that there are going to be more and more
ingredients being tested where we can't find a supplier that hasn't been involved with animal
testing. So where do we go now on cruelty free? Well, we know we're not going to have finished products
testimonials and we would like to create a new criteria against animal testing that includes
the funding of alternatives to animal experiments. Hopefully we can raise some money to get that
to happen or certainly influence authorities to make that happen. Despite the massive obstacles to cruelty
free cosmetics that Reach us thrown up, we haven't given up we're still working hard every day to do
everything we can to fight against animal testing and to improve safety through alternative technology.