Your valid thoughts aside, in practice, it just means that they test it straight on human instead of using animal first. In today's R&D for skincare and cosmetics, testing products on humans is easier and cheaper than animal testing.

lumienarchanayuki: so the vibe is actually "ugh we don't know how effective this really is because we tested on humans instead of animals as god intended"

lumienarchanayuki: that's actually good to know na it's cheaper.

Animal testing requires more actual lab testing so it can be very expensive Tbh, most skincare products are not researched mostly these days. They usually already have a base formula and then develop it. Or they take the ingredient list from a competitor product and try to recreate and improve it. So, in the end, they just need efficacy data on humans

in the interests of cost cutting they made consumers the test subjects D:

They still need to prove how effective it is on human, though, so they do go through efficacy process on volunteers for 3-6 months before it can be approved for release.

It's not the for cost cutting, though. It's more efficient because even if they choose to do animal testing, they still will have to do test on humans because efficacy that matters is from its use by the intended target.

I think most of animal testings are done because the researchers have very little idea of the effects, but right now most ingredients have been well-researched, so the negative effects can be known from the start, so they mostly want to see if the intended positive effects can be proven, thus they put the emphasis on human testing instead.

These are only from my own experience working in an R&D lab before though. Have never even faced the animal testing procedure myself except in uni where my classmates and I had to poison some mice and chicken