The lab is currently working to develop even more advanced animal-free tests for cosmetics, some of which involve growing three-dimensional models of artificial human skin to see how a cosmetic would affect the human body.

"It's a very powerful tool for doing away with the traditional animal experiments,"observes Dr Carol Baker, founder of XCELLR8 . "One of the major advantages of these models us that, because the models are 3D, they contain all the critical layers that human skin contains"