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When Josh Humbert inspects his farm, he dives into the clear blue waters of a lagoon, on a picture-perfect island that is fringed with palm trees. Humbert is the manager and owner of Kamoka Pearl, a boutique family business on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe that is trying to shake up the international pearl market by raising pearls more sustainably.

"It's like another planet," Humbert told National Geographic about Ahe, an atoll that sits just a few feet above sea level, about 300 miles (480 kilometers) northeast of Tahiti in the Tuamotu Archipelago. "There's no dirt, it's just sand and coral, so the bottoms of your bare feet don't even get dirty."

(See " Pictures: Sustainable Pearl Farming.")

Kamoka Pearl was founded in 1990 by Humbert's father and brother. A year later, halfway through college (where he studied marine biology), Josh Humbert joined the family business, which raises high-quality "Tahitian pearls" for the international jewelry market.

Humbert had spent part of his childhood growing up in French Polynesia with his family, under a roof of palm leaves near the ocean. He returned to Polynesia as an adult, although he moved back to the U.S. three years ago, to Oregon. His father, who is French, stays at the farm year-round. Humbert's mother is American.

(Related: " Building a Sustainable Lobster Fishery Off Honduras.")

How Pearl Farming Works

To raise pearls, Kamoka cultivates a native species of pearl oyster, Pinctada margaritifera. The oysters are placed in baskets or nets to protect them from predators, which include triggerfish, sea turtles, and eagle rays. Made out of plastic, those baskets or nets are hung vertically every three feet (one meter) on horizontal lines that range from 330 yards (300 meters) to 1.3 miles (2 kilometers).

The end of the line is anchored with a concrete block at the bottom of the lagoon, 100 to 200 feet (30 to 60 meters) down, or it is tied to a coral formation on the bottom. Vertical stabilizers are placed along the line, and buoys are interspersed to help hold the oysters at a depth of around 20 feet (6 meters).

The next step involves seeding the oyster to produce a pearl. An oyster makes pearls on its own by secreting nacre, or mother of pearl, around an irritant that gets into its shell. Contrary to popular belief, according to Humbert, that irritant is most often an invading worm that bored in, not a grain of sand.

In the case of Tahitian oysters, the pearls are often colorful-sometimes even black-due to the specific chemistry of the species.

At oyster farms, when the mollusks are large enough, a worker carefully pries open the shell and inserts a small nucleus, or bead, as well as a piece of mantle cut from another pearl oyster. That process is called grafting, and the bit of mantle helps the oyster start laying down nacre, explained Humbert.

Kamoka uses beads that have been cut from the mother of pearl in dead oyster shells, to a size of six to eight millimeters in diameter. Not every bead starts becoming a pearl, but those that do stretch out the oyster tissue around it, forming a small cavity.

To obtain another, larger pearl in the same oyster, farmers often take out the small pearl and replace it with a larger bead. In another two to three years, if all goes well, that bead will get covered with nacre, to form a large, shiny pearl.

After that pearl is harvested, the oyster is usually "sacrificed" because it is unlikely to produce another pearl so shiny. The meat may be consumed locally, although there isn't an international market for the flesh of pearl oyster species. To replace the lost oysters, farmers usually collect spat, or larva, from the lagoon where they work.

In addition to the skilled labor that grafting requires, since 2003 Kamoka has also hired a revolving cast of young people from around the world, who come to work as part of the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) program. Participants receive free room and board, as well as a chance to learn the trade, in exchange for their labor.

"We are kind of the ocean's version of organic farming," said Humbert.

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When Josh Humbert inspects his farm, he dives into the clear blue waters of a lagoon, on a picture-perfect island that is fringed with palm trees. Humbert is the manager and owner of Kamoka Pearl, a boutique family business on the French Polynesian atoll of Ahe that is trying to shake up the international pearl market by raising pearls more sustainably.

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ethical pearl farming (ik its PETA but maybe it could be useful?)

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ethical pearl farming (ik its PETA but maybe it could be useful?)

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There is nothing beautiful about the torture and death of millions of animals. Pearls are stolen from living beings, oysters, who are exploited and murdered. They form when an irritant or foreign object enters the shell of an oyster or mussel. These animals respond to the stress by coating the object with nacre, the crystalline substance that gives pearls their luster. Because only about one in 10,000 oysters will produce a pearl naturally-not nearly enough to keep up with demand-pearlmakers have devised a process called "culturing" or "cultivating," which allows them to exploit oysters faster and cheaper.

During culturing, farmers pry open oysters' shells and insert an irritant, a presumably painful practice that results in the death of half the oysters. The cruelty doesn't end there: Farmers then suspend the oysters in water in a cage, moving them around and subjecting them to different water temperatures to create the desired shape, size and color of the pearls. The oysters are then pried open for a second time so that the pearls can be extracted. One-third of oysters are "recycled" and subjected to this stressful process again; the rest are killed.

Pearls are used in jewelry, of course, but they are also a common ingredient in cosmetics-pearl powder is used in everything from nail polish to lipstick. Even the animals' shells aren't off-limits: After the oysters and mussels have been killed, the mother of pearl-the iridescent material that forms the inside lining of their shells-is taken for jewelry and decorative items.

For people concerned about the environment, there's another reason to pass on pearls: Raising animals on aquafarms pollutes our oceans, and overharvesting oysters is destroying natural oyster beds beyond repair.

With so many kind options available, there's no excuse for killing oysters-or any animals-for jewelry, fashion, or makeup. Help save oysters and the Earth by refusing to buy anything made with pearls.

Posted by Edwina Baier

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There is nothing beautiful about the torture and death of millions of animals. Pearls are stolen from living beings, oysters, who are exploited and murdered. They form when an irritant or foreign object enters the shell of an oyster or mussel.

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Are pearls ethical?
Should circuses with animals be allowed?
Should animals be tested on?

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Are pearls ethical? Are pearls eco friendly? are pearls vegan? Eco friendly pearls, ethical pearls, why pearls can be good for the sea, sustainable pearls

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The Welfare of Performing Animals. A Historical Perspective. By David A. H. Wilson. Springer: Berlin, Germany, 2015; 278 pp; $189.00; ISBN 978-3-662-50931-9

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Phillips is the editor of this series on scholarly works on animal welfare which are “designed to contribute towards a culture of respect for animals and their welfare by producing learned treatises…”. However, his opinions on the issue of performing animals are evident. He mentions the anthropocent…

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The fight to end factory farming has long been vexed by a disconnect: While experts estimate that 6 percent of the world's farm animals are located in the US and Europe, advocacy groups in those regions collect the lion's share of funding.

Last year, about $200 million went into the farmed animal advocacy movement, according to a survey of several hundred nonprofits conducted by Farmed Animal Funders. Only about one-fifth of that reached activists in countries outside the US and EU, where the vast majority of animals are farmed.

This misallocation of resources comes against a backdrop of worrisome trends. Meat consumption is rising in the developing world, particularly in Asia. Intensive farming practices are becoming the norm in Latin America and Asia, and they are getting a foothold in Africa as well. According to one estimate, nine out of 10 animals raised for food globally are confined in factory farms.

The animal rights movement is responding - and not a moment too soon. From São Paulo to Shanghai, local organizations focused on animal protection are growing fast. Meanwhile, nonprofits that once worked only in the US, including Mercy For Animals and the Humane League, now have staff in Brazil, Mexico, India, and Japan.

Institutional funders are supporting advocacy and public awareness campaigns across Latin America and Asia. "We've shifted funding to the Global South," says Amanda Hungerford, a program officer at Open Philanthropy, the world's biggest funder of farm animal advocacy. She expects that trend to continue. Kieran Greig, a manager of the EA Animal Welfare Fund, says by email: "Our grantmaking to the global south has increased significantly in these past five or so years. I am optimistic that the percentage of giving to the global south will continue to increase steadily."

These early efforts have led to some gains. For instance, the Open Wing Alliance, a global but decentralized network that was incubated by the Humane League, has brought together 79 organizations from 63 countries, most in the Global South, to campaign against battery cages for egg-laying hens, considered one of the cruelest factory farming practices. It reported earlier this year that more than 2,000 companies around the world have adopted cage-free egg policies, and that 85 percent of companies that pledged to use cage-free eggs by 2020 or earlier have done so.

"We can put pressure on the company at the global headquarters and rally our partners to pressure regional branches and outlets," says Alexandria Beck, the alliance's director.

Carolina Galvani founded Sinergia Animal in 2017 to focus on farm animal welfare issues in Brazil, after spending a decade working for US- and UK-based advocacy groups. "Parts of the Global South were being ignored," she explains.

At first, she was its only paid employee. Today, Sinergia Animal has more than 30 full-time staff members, an annual budget of $850,000, and operations in six South American countries, as well as in Thailand and Indonesia. "If we want to see a truly global movement, we need to have strong organizations originating and working in the south," Galvani says.

But the scale of the challenge facing animal welfare advocates is daunting, and the movement faces new obstacles as it expands around the world. It's difficult to identify startup organizations or leaders to fund, donors say. Meat consumption remains a marker of economic well-being in many places. Western donors and activists can't assume that tactics that worked in the West - investigations of factory farms, say, or street-level protests - can simply be exported everywhere else, and have to be mindful to defer to locals on strategy, so as not to violate cultural norms and laws.

By far the steepest challenges are in China. China farms more animals than any other country. Altogether, China consumes almost one-third of the world's meat, although its per capita consumption is still less than half that of the US. Yet the animal advocacy community there is small, and groups in China play by strict rules set by the government.

Second to China in terms of its farmed animal population is India. There, strong laws prohibiting animal cruelty are rarely enforced. Despite the country being home to more vegetarians than any other country, meat and dairy consumption are on the rise.

The question now is whether the animal advocacy movement can build on its progress in rich countries, even as it seeks to expand to the Global South. It has won meaningful victories, including an EU ban on battery cages for egg-laying hens and a slew of corporate animal welfare commitments in the US, and it has helped power the growth of plant-based alternatives to milk and meat.

Even so, huge problems remain in the West, notably the misery suffered by the billions of chickens raised for meat every year. Funding is not just limited but meager: The estimated $200 million a year spent on farm animal welfare is a fraction of the amount devoted to more popular causes, like climate change. Donors and activists will have to decide where to allocate their money, their time, and especially their creativity. New thinking will be required to build a robust animal welfare movement in countries where hundreds of millions of people live without electricity or suffer from malnutrition.

How the animal protection movement went global

In January 2021, Mercy For Animals launched the Farmed Animal Opportunity Index (FAOI), a tool designed to guide the organization's international expansion. US- and EU-based nonprofits have been expanding their operations in the Global South in recent years, but they had sometimes done so in an ad hoc manner.

The FAOI brings rigor to the process. Using publicly available data, Mercy For Animals' index ranks what it has identified as the 60 countries that are most important to farm animal welfare. (China tops the list, with the US close behind. Latvia is No. 60.)

Like many nonprofits and donors that work on behalf of farm animals, the FAOI is shaped by the principles of effective altruism, a philosophy and social movement that uses reason and evidence to do the most possible good. To allocate resources to solve problems, many effective altruists rely on a framework that looks at a problem's scale, tractability, and neglectedness.

The FAOI ranks countries based on scale (how many farmed land animals and fish are raised there) and tractability(the likelihood of success). It leaves out neglectedness, the third pillar, because it is too hard to quantify. Instead, the index seeks to measure global influence, meaning the degree to which one country affects others.

"Global influence plays an important role," says Lucas Alvarenga, Mercy For Animals' senior vice president for strategy, which is why the dollars do not simply match up with the number of animals in each country. The US, Germany, and the Netherlands top the rankings of influencers because progress in those countries has consequences beyond their borders, through trade agreements, corporate animal welfare commitments, and global media. (In case you're wondering, the Netherlands is by some metrics the world's second-largest exporter of agricultural products.) Alvarenga is careful to say that the index, which has been shared widely in the movement, is designed as a starting point for analysis and not as a decision-making tool.

Europe, by most accounts, has been a pioneer in animal welfare reforms. The EU's directive to eliminate conventional battery cages, for example, which was enacted in 1999, laid the groundwork for the global movement to free egg-laying hens from cages. California voters enacted a ballot measure to phase out battery cages in 2008, after which dozens of big food companies made commitments to source cage-free eggs. David Coman-Hidy, president of the Humane League, says, "What happened on cage-free in the US probably would not have happened had the EU not acted years earlier."

Looking to take the cage-free momentum everywhere, the Humane League started the Open Wing Alliance in 2016, around the same time other organizations and funders began to take a more global approach.

Open Wing's focus is cage-free campaigns, both because of the number of animals affected and because the demand to liberate hens from cages is easy to explain, even in countries where animal protection issues are new.

"You can get people to empathize," the alliance's Alexandria Beck says. "They wouldn't want to be fenced into a small space. They don't want chickens confined in a small cage either."

This fall, Yum Brands, the world's largest fast food company, which owns KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, pledged to eliminate battery cages in its entire global supply chain after Open Wing members staged street protests in Eastern Europe, Russia, Indonesia, and Nigeria (along with the usual petitions and social media campaigns).

One country that has drawn a lot of attention from US- and EU-based animal rights advocates - and where some notable progress has been made - is Brazil, one of the world's largest producers and exporters of livestock.

Animal Equality, the Good Food Institute, Humane Society International, Mercy For Animals, and World Animal Protection all have operations in Brazil, engaging in a broad range of activities - public awareness work, vegan advocacy, celebrity engagement, undercover investigations, corporate campaigns, and support for developing plant-based and cell-based meat.

Brazil's food industry has responded. São Paulo-based JBS, which is by far the world's largest meat company, pledged in 2017 to source exclusively cage-free eggs by 2020; it missed that target date but has made meaningful progress, activists say. Meanwhile, BRF, Brazil's largest producer and exporter of chickens, has fulfilled a pledge to source cage-free eggs for its processed foods.

Humane Society International (HSI) works with school districts in Brazil to shift from meat to plant-based food in 20 percent of their meals. "I was surprised at the number of schools that were interested," says Julie Janovsky, vice president for farm animal welfare at HSI.

Sinergia Animal has moved beyond cage-free campaigns to push BRF to improve its welfare practices for pigs and Nestlé to improve the treatment of dairy cows in its supply chain. Other groups working on farm animals include Alianima and Forum Animal, which were started in Brazil and get funding from Western donors.

But the corporate pressure campaigns that have proven effective in the US, EU, and Brazil don't work everywhere. Different tactics are required in cultures that frown on confrontation, particularly in Asia, activists say, so local groups typically approach industry in a spirit of cooperation.

The Environment and Animal Society of Taiwan, for example, works with retailers and egg producers to create a cage-free supply chain. The group recently made progress on the issue when the Taiwanese government announced it will mandate that eggs from caged hens be labeled as such.

In Singapore, where there's little local agriculture but an eagerness to innovate, activists focus on developing plant- and cell-based alternatives to meat. Last year, Singapore became the first country in the world to approve the sale of cell-based meat when regulators approved a chicken product made by Eat Just.

In Africa, where the vast majority of land animals are still raised and slaughtered by small-scale farmers, the animal rights movement is just getting started. The EA Animal Welfare Fund and Open Wing Alliance have made grants to the Africa Network for Animal Welfare, a group based in Kenya, to research the prevalence of battery cages in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Tanzania. Other groups are engaging with regulators who are setting fish welfare standards in South Africa and cage-free campaigns in Nigeria.

But the biggest opportunities outside of the US and EU to curb global animal suffering, per FAOI, are in China and India.

Unlike the meat industry in Brazil, where markets are dominated by some of the world's biggest food companies and large-scale farmers, India's vast meat and dairy industry is decentralized, consisting of millions of rural, small-scale operations.

Reliable data is hard to come by, but it's estimated there are some 75 million dairy farms in India. India is the world's largest producer and consumer of milk, with about half coming from cows and half from buffalo.

The industry structure is a barrier to animal advocacy, explains Vasanthi Vadi, a founder of several Indian animal rights groups. "You will find small dairies in every village," she says, and livestock can be well treated, relatively speaking. "If a farmer has six buffaloes, they all have names."

Another obstacle is poverty, which remains widespread. Government policy, for example, seeks to increase the production of eggs, a cheap source of protein, to reduce malnutrition and lift the income of farmers. The government goes so far as to supply chicks to poor farmers. People are unlikely to jump from being food-insecure to being vegan.

Despite all that, there are reasons to be optimistic about India's growing animal protection movement. India has more vegetarians than any other country - as high as 37 percent of the populace, according to government surveys, although some estimates put the number at more like 20 percent.

Importantly, India's 1960 constitution makes it the "duty of every citizen ... to have compassion for all living creatures," and a strong animal welfare law prohibits "causing unnecessary pain to any animal" and "keeping any animal in a cage where it doesn't have reasonable opportunity of movement." The Dalai Lama welcomed the Humane Society International to India when it opened an office in Hyderabad in 2012.

Given this legal precedent, animal advocates focus on enforcing or strengthening current laws rather than lobbying for new ones. People for Animals, which calls itself India's largest animal welfare group, provides training to police on the effective enforcement of welfare laws. FIAPO, a federation of animal welfare groups, has pushed for state-by-state guidelines on the treatment of dairy animals.

The national government has issued directives to ban battery cages, as have the courts, but with little effect on farming practices. "Implementation is always a challenge," says Shreya Paropkari, a senior campaign manager at Humane Society International in India.

Though efforts to improve animal welfare on farms are gaining steam, India's animal protection movement is largely devoted to companion animals, as the US movement was during its early years. "Most NGOs focus on rescue and rehab," Vadi says. "Advocacy work is a little more challenging."

Meanwhile, China poses a unique challenge for animal welfare - and an opportunity. A recent analysis by the nonprofit Faunalytics concluded: "Supporting the animal protection community in China should be a key goal of globally oriented animal advocates."

But what, exactly, can advocates do when the government won't tolerate dissent? Chinese authorities promote factory farms because of their productivity and efficiency.

"The expansion of China's animal agriculture is not an accident," says Peter J. Li, an adviser to Humane Society International and author of the book Animal Welfare in China. "It is deliberate government policy. The government is obsessed with food security."

What's more, much of the population is neither aware of nor interested in animal welfare issues, according to Li. Older people remember what's been called the Great Chinese Famine, a period of mass starvation between 1959 and 1961. They don't want to be told to eat less meat.

"I've given up on older people. They're hopeless," Li says.

The situation, fortunately, is far from hopeless. Young people in China's cities who aspire to middle-class lives do not want to see animals treated cruelly, activists say. (There's no polling data to support that claim, but pet ownership - which can lead to awareness of animal welfare issues - is rising rapidly.) Young people are showing interest in vegetarian diets, in part because of worries about climate change and food safety; an African swine fever epidemic in 2018 and 2019 is thought to have killed more than half of China's hogs.

Animal welfare groups are free to raise awareness about the benefits of consuming less meat, so long as they don't criticize the government. Considering tofu originated in China 2,000 years ago and meatless meats are commonplace in grocery stores and on restaurant menus, vegetarianism could be an easier sell there than in some countries.

Paradoxically, China's authoritarian system could become a boon to animal welfare should the state choose to get behind plant-based alternatives to meat. In 2016, China's health ministry issued new dietary guidelines urging citizens to reduce their meat consumption by half out of concern for public health; it's unclear whether that has made a difference, but there's no doubt the state has the ability to drive the growth of plant-based meats by offering low-cost capital or state contracts. Government records recently reviewed by the Good Food Institute indicate that significant funds are being allocated to help the plant-based sector scale up.

Other activists say corporate animal welfare pledges and global trade create opportunities to influence welfare practices in China. After leading Humane Society International's work in India, Jayasimha Nuggehalli moved to Singapore to start Global Food Partners, a consulting firm that helps businesses throughout Asia source higher-welfare eggs and meat.

Global firms including Accor Hotels, Hilton, Marriott, Nestlé, Unilever, and Yum Brands have all made global pledges to go cage-free, but they need help developing supply chains in China, Nuggehalli says. Global Food Partners helped one of the largest egg producers in China develop a pilot cage-free farm with about 60,000 birds.

"What really has led to change in Asia are corporate commitments," he says. Building awareness of animal welfare issues and influencing government policy in China could take decades.

Mercy For Animals' Leah Garcés worked in China earlier in her career, seeking to persuade the government to pursue more humane slaughter practices for pigs in order to comply with EU rules regulating imports.

"I think we have to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks," Garcés says. "We have not cracked the code. Nobody has."
Marc Gunther is a veteran reporter who writes about the animal welfare movement, among other issues.

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Why the future of animal welfare lies beyond the West

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Factory farming is spreading around the world. Animal welfare groups are trying to keep up.

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It was 2013 when the news echoed through Europe: the much-needed, long-awaited ban on selling and marketing cosmetics tested on animals in the EU was finally coming into effect. Animal rights campaigners and conscious beauty lovers everywhere rejoiced. The next year, India followed suit and banned the practice. Australia's ban came into force last year. Internationally, over 40 countries have to date implemented laws to completely ban or somewhat restrict animal testing for cosmetics and personal-care products.

In light of this legislation, it's easy to believe that testing cosmetics on animals isn't something that happens anymore - and that is in fact what many people believe. Unfortunately, reality is much bleaker: according to PETA's estimates, approximately 300,000 animals are used every year in China alone for cosmetics testing, and the global figures are likely to be much higher.

What actually happens to animals in tests? Life in laboratories are akin to the stuff of nightmares: pregnant rabbits are force-fed ingredients, then killed with their unborn babies. Ingredients are rubbed into animals' skin, dropped into their eyes, or forced down their throats. Animals used for cosmetics testing include rabbits, rats, guinea pigs, mice and dogs. They often live in small, barren cages, and after the test is concluded, the animals are most commonly killed.

PETA UK's Science Policy Manager Dr Julia Baines joined the organisation after having worked in a laboratory that performs animal testing, and her experiences are haunting: "I've seen mice torn apart by cagemates who had been driven insane and made aggressive by the stress of confinement. I've visited laboratories where dogs are experimented on, and I'll never forget the anguished cries of the beagles there, who were vying for attention, longing for someone to play with. I've observed primates imprisoned in cramped, almost barren cages - which have no ropes for them to swing on - who are given no opportunity to socialise. They're so desperate for affection that they reach out to passing visitors, hoping for someone - anyone - to stop and notice them."
Related Post: Everything You Need to Know About Transitioning to Vegan Beauty Products

Photo: Elnur.

But all of this doesn't apply to our beauty products...correct? After all, if we live in a country where animal testing is banned, none of this happens for our lipsticks and face creams, right? Wrong. Let's take the EU sales and marketing ban, for example. Under the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) legislation, even ingredients that are used only for cosmetics can be tested on animals if there is any risk of workforce exposure during the production process. This constitutes a pretty major loophole. And this legislation - with all its imperfections - is now under threat, as the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has introduced recent test requirements that circumvent it and put animals back in laboratories. ECHA is calling for new tests of ingredients that have been safely used for many years, and data on their safety already exists. To counteract this, animal protection groups such as PETA and Cruelty Free International, alongside cruelty-free beauty brands Dove and The Body Shop, have launched a European Citizens' Initiative calling for the vital bans to be saved.

And then we have China - the second-biggest beauty market in the world, which requires cosmetic products that will be sold in the country to be tested on animals. This means that any brand which brings its products into China cannot be considered cruelty-free. So no, your favourite big-name brands from the beauty counter are not "automatically" cruelty-free just because of the bans. To know whether they are, it's not enough to ask them whether they test on animals - but it can give helpful clues. Brands that do engage in animal testing are likely to say, "we never test on animals... unless required by law. " The requirements they are talking about are indeed those needed to be able to sell their products in China. So a better way of knowing if a brand is indeed cruelty-free is to find out whether they sell in China. Companies have been taken off cruelty-free lists for succumbing to the lure of selling in China, and others have pulled out of this huge, lucrative market in order to be approved as cruelty-free.

However, there is significant progress going on in China, too. Last year, the country put an end to the mandatory requirement for animal testing for many types of cosmetic products, including shampoo and most makeup. As monumental as this step is, it doesn't mean that all animal testing for cosmetics in China is now over. The RSPCA notes that the change does not include "special-use cosmetics", which applies to hair dye, sunscreen, and more. Companies that wish to avoid testing on animals also have to pass a series of application steps.

"We believe there's absolutely no justification for causing animals to suffer for testing cosmetics, and consumers across the globe have shown that they feel the same," the head of the RSPCA's animals in science department, Dr Penny Hawkins, has told Dazed. "Whilst we of course welcome this step forward for China, globally we still have a long way to go before we see our ultimate aim realised of all animal experiments being replaced with humane alternatives."

What humane alternatives is Dr Hawkins talking about? Well, considering the fact that over 90% of drugs tested on animals fail in human trials, it's definitely time we stepped away from this outdated and inaccurate form of doing research - in all areas, not just cosmetics. And modern science does just that. Alternative methods include growing 3D structures from cells to mimic human organs, donated human tissue, and computer models. These methods are able to more accurately provide life-saving results than pretending that the body of a human and that of a mouse don't have a variety of physical and biomedical differences that make animal testing unreliable.

Animal testing for cosmetics will one day come to an end. Before it does, there is only one sure-fire way to ensure you didn't pay for a guinea pig to suffer for your eyeshadow: only buy from brands that are certified as cruelty-free. The main certifications are Cruelty Free International's Leaping Bunny (commonly used in Europe), PETA's Beauty Without Bunnies programme (global, very prevalent in the US) and Choose Cruelty Free's rabbit (the main Australian accreditation, which has recently become part of Cruelty Free International). Don't trust companies' own rabbit symbols and assurances. Go with the programmes that are proven to have a rigorous certification and verification process, and you can trust that the end products - and all ingredients - are truly cruelty-free.
Recommending reading:

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In 2021, How is Animal Testing for Cosmetics Still a Thing?

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Animal testing for cosmetics will one day come to an end. Before it does, there is only one sure-fire way to ensure you didn't pay for a guinea pig to suffer for your eyeshadow: only buy from brands that are certified as cruelty-free.

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A Review of Introducing Issues with Opposing Viewpoints: Animal Rights

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The book is divided into three sections. The first section is titled "Should animals have rights?" and has four articles by authors supporting (Richard Ryder, Patrick Battuello, Josephine Donovan, and Justin Goodman) and four by authors opposing (William Saletan, Wesley Smith, Charles Colson and Anne Morse, and Michael Conn) animal rights.