L’Oreal is to 3D-print human skin for use in cosmetics testing. It’s a development of an existing program of producing the skin in a lab.

According to the BBC, L’Oreal already uses donated tissue to grow more than 100,000 skin samples a year for testing purposes, avoiding the need for testing on animals or live humans. Each sample is 0.5 square centimetres and covers nine different age and ethnicity groups. Around 60 staff work on the project, which has been running since the 1980s.

It now says it is in an early stage of a partnership with Organovo, a company that says it can 3D-print human organs. L’Oreal says:

Our partnership will not only bring about new advanced in vitro methods for evaluating product safety and performance, but the potential for where this new field of technology and research can take us is boundless.

The partnership will involve L’Oreal providing the funding and the “skin expertise” while Organovo takes care of the tech. They’ve divided up the usage rights to the 3D-printed skin, with Organovo getting the exclusivity on using it for drug testing and other medical uses, while L’Oreal gets the exclusive on cosmetic skin care testing.

Scientists quoted in the media are, to say the least, skeptical about some of Organovo’s previous claims to be able to print a human liver. Alan Faulkner-Jones said that although the material used was technically liver tissue, the resulting object might not have the same structure as the real thing.

He said that 3D-printing skin was more plausible because it’s made up of layers, which is the basis of how such printers work.

If things work as planned, the output shouldn’t be any different to L’Oreal’s current skin sample production; all that would change would be the speed of production and thus the total amount of sample available. According to Bloomberg L’Oreal already sells around half the sample it makes, to both pharmaceutical firms and other cosmetic manufacturers.