Jacqueline Traide, a social sculpture student at Oxford Brookes University, volunteered to go through extreme brutal treatment in full public view to protest animal testing for cosmetics. She was manhandled, smothered, chocked, injected and ill-treated in front of hundreds of onlookers at London’s Regent Street.
Traide endured 10 hours of torture dressed nothing but a flesh-coloured body stocking. The ghastly tests included shaving her hair and having irritants squirted in her eye, forced chemical exposure, oral force feeding, skin and muscle injections, physical restraint, food and water deprivation, surgical procedures, infliction of wounds and burns.
After the ‘experiments’ were over, Traide said, “I hope it will plant the seed of a new awareness in people to really start thinking about what they go out and buy and what goes into producing it.”
Lush Cosmetics, in collaboration with Humane Society International, had launched this global protest against animal testing for cosmetics, and the London demonstration’s mission was “intended to shock”. The group wrote:
“When a young woman chose to undergo animal tests in our flagship shop window she was choosing to challenge women across the world with this fact that has – for too long – been a silent and ‘unfortunate’ side effect of our daily beauty routines.
“Beauty is supposed to make us feel confident and special. In its best forms it is about telling the story of who we really are or who we really want to be. When we are forced to recognise that this aspirational industry depends upon the needless suffering and death of millions of innocent animals – animals that could have been our dog, our children’s guinea pigs, our neighbours’ rabbits – animals that we humanely love – we are shocked and we recoil. We also are challenged to make sure that animals are no longer the hidden victims of our cosmetics industry.
“We know the images are stark, even brutal, but they are images, they are not the reality of a laboratory animal’s suffering. It’s horrible to think that the ‘feel good’ beauty industry contains such dark secrets and such helpless victims and it’s even worse to think who is responsible for that suffering.”
I have issues. That just looked like a public BDSM session to me. I mean, I get WHY she’s doing it and I completely support the end of animal testing, but the way she went about it just looked like she’s advertising for a hardcore dungeon.
I thought the same.
How is this representative of the subject she was trying to raise awareness of, bitch? (I said bitch to avoid ending the sentence with a pronoun)
Animal testing and other exploitation needs to be ended…
No replies as yet, but I will reply. Kudos to Jacqueline Traide for enduring what must have been for her a question of whether she would even survive the treatments she went through. I’m sure many animals do not, and if they dont they just get other animals. The next step would be for her to identify humane alternatives to each of the things that they did, and for her or somebody to ask these cosmetic producers on each of these alternatives why they do not do them. I am sure that their answer would be in each case that it would cost more money, and so a “report card” would be produced, listing the procedures, the humane alternatives, and the reason the humane alternatives were not followed – in each case, to make more money. If just enough people would look at that report card before they buy whatever cosmetic product was produced by these procedures.
What human being would degrade them-self to such a high extent? For what? So we stop testing medicine on half sentient animals in order to ensure that the product is safe and fit for purpose?
I don’t pity the animals that she is going through all the pain to ‘protect’;
I pity her.
This isn’t medical testing. It’s cosmetics testing. So we can be “beautiful” animals are tortured. Pay attention to what you read.
So, according to your logic, we should legalize all forms of animal abuse and torture
That’s funny.. I pity you for being so ignorant.. and not knowing how to read. You’re a douche bag.
Pay attention people. This isn’t talking about medical testing, rather cosmetic testing. These animals are tortured so we can look “beautiful.”
OK! I get what she’s standing for, now, is this gonna change anything at all?!?
I mean IF the purpose is to make people “not buy” cosmetic products, well, she’s a woman and no woman will not buy makeup stuff because it might have been tested out in animals. As same as we all know there’s people starving around the globe and still we keep doing our things spending money in luxuaries. Well we can’t eat money can we!
It’s just pointless but that’s ok… Good deed girl.
The purpose is not to make people buy no cosmetic products.
You can already buy cosmetics labeled “no animal testing”, if u r just up to avoid these cruelties for yourself.
The purpose surely is to get more companies to use such a label. Imagine Loreal, for example, would do such a thing. This would be a great improvement.