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LUSH has awarded £330,000 in funding to campaigners and scientists from 11 countries in support of their work to end animal testing.
During the 2017 LUSH Prize event held last weekend in London, cruelty-free beauty brand LUSH awarded £330,000 to companies and individuals actively working to end animal testing.
LUSH prize
The LUSH prize, which is an annual fund launched in 2012, has provided more than £1.8 million to support animal-free testing and campaigns around the world.
The LUSH Prize is changing the complex system of testing chemicals for safety by helping to fund new technologies that do not rely on animal-based models. Winners were selected from a shortlist of 66 entrants from 29 countries in five categories, including lobbying, training, public awareness, young researchers, and science.
According to the brand, it is: “The idea of The Lush Prize was to reward a ‘eureka’ moment when a breakthrough is made that would mean the end of testing on animals for cosmetics safety forever.”
Engineer Jennifer Lewis won the notable science prize for her work in creating “organ-on-a-chip”—a technology that uses tissues grown from human cells for toxicology testing.
Training prize winner the Human Toxicology Project Consortium—funded by The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS)—was honoured for its work to promote training programs that use software in lieu of animal chemical safety tests.
Outdated
Troy Seidle, senior director of research and toxicology at Humane Society International (an affiliate of HSUS), believes that testing chemicals on animals is an outdated practice that does not produce human-relevant results—as toxicology tests on mice cannot be replicated on rats.
“In 20 years or less,” Seidle told VegNews, “animal toxicology testing will be in the past.”
Although unfortunately not all of LUSH’s products are currently vegan, they take a hardline stance against animal testing, and have a wide range of vegan options, and don’t include any non-vegetarian products in their cosmetics.
