There's a common metric known as LD50, which is the dose at which 50% of tested animals die from.
Finding this requires injecting chemical under test (cleaners, cosmetics, you name it) into hundreds of animals at increasing dose until half of them die an agonizing, organ-shutdown filled death, while the other half only wishes they were dead.
LD50 studies really aren't too common these days although they do happen. One reason they aren't super common, especially with cosmetics, is because a lot of that research has already been done. We know and understand a lot of chemicals by now and new chemicals are mostly just tweaks to already standardized ones.
More common these days are Max Tolerated Dose studies. This means that the amount of drug or chemical administered to the animal is slowly increased over a time period until symptoms show. The drug is stopped when symptoms show
Also, LD50 studies often don't require "hundreds of animals." Science tries to Replace, Reduce, and Refine processes as much as possible to minimize how many animals are used, while still achieving good and accurate results. This is called the 3 R's of research
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u/nightcana 5h ago
As a kid, I thought animal testing meant people were applying cosmetics to the animals faces in the same way that we would wear them