Maryland State Senator Clarence K. Lam has introduced a bill that would ban the sale, in Maryland, of cosmetics tested on animals. It would also ban the sale of any cosmetic that contains any ingredient that was tested on animals.
If it were to pass, Maryland would join California, Nevada, and Illinois as the only jurisdictions in the U.S. that ban the sale of cosmetics tested on animals. Maryland would also join the United Kingdom, which banned the practice in 1998; Israel, which banned the practice in 2007; and the European Union, which banned the practice in 2013.
Recent attempts at the federal level to ban cosmetics testing on animals have failed. In November 2019, Rep. Donald Beyer of Virginia introduced The Humane Cosmetics Act of 2019 (H.R. 5141) to prohibit anyone from conducting cosmetic testing on animals and to prohibit the sale or transport of any cosmetic that had been tested on animals. The bill died in committee.
FDA neither requires nor prohibits cosmetic testing on animals. Indeed, FDA does not require cosmetics testing at all. FDA currently has no authority to require a manufacturer to get premarket approval for cosmetics. The only way FDA can remove an unsafe cosmetic from the market is if it finds the cosmetic to be “adulterated,” which means, generally speaking, that it contains a “poisonous or deleterious substance” or “consists in whole or in part of any filthy, putrid, or decomposed substance.”
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