Bio: Dr Carl Westmoreland is a toxicologist who retired from full-time work at Unilever in 2024, where he worked for over 20 years in the Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC) in the UK. A large part of his role in Unilever focused on the strategic development and application of the science needed for non-animal, risk-based safety assessments. He now works part-time for Unilever as well as other consultancy activities. Previously, he received his PhD from the University of Surrey, UK and worked as a toxicologist at GlaxoSmithKline in the UK for 10 years. Carl is currently a member of the UK Animals in Science Committee and a Fellow of the British Toxicology Society. He has previously worked with several scientific groups relating to the assessment of safety without animal testing, including EPAA, ECETOC, UK NC3Rs, AFSA and Cefic and has been a member of the EURL-ECVAM Scientific Advisory Committee.

Abstract: It is now over 20 years since the 7th Amendment of the Cosmetics Directive was first published which was to ban the testing of cosmetic products and their ingredients on animals in the EU. Since 2009, conducting acute toxicity tests has been banned for assuring the safety of cosmetic ingredients and similar bans now exist in at least 45 countries. Enormous scientific progress has been made such that there are now several examples of human safety assessments of cosmetic ingredients that use solely non-animal approaches. During this time, many non-animal approaches for use in safety assessments for acute and local toxicities have been adopted including those for eye and skin irritation (EC, 2023) and most recently, Defined Approaches for skin sensitisation that allow quantitative points-of-departure to be derived without animal testing for use in consumer risk assessments (OECD, 2025). Whilst consumer safety assessments of cosmetic ingredients for acute and local toxicity endpoints are now routinely conducted without the need for new animal testing, there are still challenges with use of some of these approaches in the context of some chemicals regulations which will be discussed.

EC (2023). SCCS Notes of guidance for the testing of cosmetic ingredients and their safety evaluation - 12th revision.

OECD (2025) Guideline No 497: Defined approaches on skin sensitisation. OECD guidelines for the testing of chemicals.