Ethics of studies involving human volunteers. II. Relevance and practical implementation for cosmetic scientists.

The importance to the personal products industry of testing novel products in healthy human volunteers and the need to ensure the trials were both safe and ethical were addressed in Part I. The historical development of ethical standards for human testing was also summarized. The present paper highlights the ethical principles to be considered when testing novel non-medicinal products on human volunteers, and it describes how they can be implemented in a pragmatic manner to avoid delay to the sponsor's research program. The structure and function of ethics committees is discussed.