Unveiling the Unseen Hazards in Your Personal Care Products: A Call for Consumer Awareness
In our daily routines, we often trust that the personal care products we use are safe and have undergone rigorous testing. While regulations exist to protect both consumers and the environment, a deeper examination reveals that compliance is not always a guarantee. This prompts a critical question: Are these regulations being enforced sufficiently to motivate brands to prioritise compliance?
As a dedicated compliance officer in the cosmetic industry, I’ve developed an eagle eye for identifying non-compliant products. I’ve encountered them across the spectrum, from niche brands to industry giants. However, what concerns me even more is the average consumer’s lack of awareness regarding whether the products they use have undergone the necessary testing procedures to ensure safety.
Many consumers today rely on apps claiming to determine ingredient safety. These tools offer valuable insights, but here’s the catch: ingredient safety isn’t solely about individual components. It’s about how these ingredients interact within a product. This assessment, crucial for consumer safety, comes in the form of a Cosmetic Product Safety Report (CPSR).
A CPSR is the gold standard for determining product safety, and it’s the only way to be sure that a cosmetic product is genuinely safe for consumers. To issue a CPSR, two vital tests must be completed and submitted for assessment:
1. Stability Test: This test verifies that the product remains stable throughout its shelf life. An unstable product can lead to pH shifts, rendering ingredients ineffective and potentially harmful to your skin.
2. Preservative Efficacy Test: Essential for products containing Aqua (water), this test ensures the preservative system’s effectiveness. Without it, the product can become a breeding ground for harmful bacteria, yeasts, and moulds, potentially causing contamination. Crucially, these harmful reactions are often invisible to the naked eye, making this test indispensable.
Without a passed Stability Test and Preservative Efficacy Test, no CPSR is issued, rendering the product unauthorised for sale. However, there’s a concerning gap in these regulations, especially in the pet care product sector. For example, not a single pet product in the UK or EU market holds a valid CPSR. Some brands do act responsibly and have a Preservative Efficacy Test done on the product but are unable to proceed to the CPSR as laboratories have no regulation to address with regard to ingredient safety usage levels.
Consider this: in the UK alone, there are 10,000 registered dog groomers. The volumes of pet shampoo used daily washed into our waters, remain unmonitored. This issue is not the fault of brands but rather a result of regulatory gaps. While we push for these necessary regulations to be introduced, we must acknowledge that the safety of products applied to our pets, which subsequently make contact with human skin and enter our environment, deserves the same rigorous standards.
Current Regulations
Returning to the challenges and current regulations in the personal care industry, a lack of enforcement is a pressing issue. Educating consumers to identify products that may have bypassed essential safety tests is of paramount importance. Our commitment to consumer safety should compel us to act.
The photo above shows four different preservative systems and those on the left reveal visible contamination. These issues are noticeable only because we’ve initiated a specific process. Without this intervention, the product would appear normal, and we’d apply it to our skin, unaware of the hidden dangers lurking within.
The bigger issue is this: there’s currently no straightforward way for consumers to verify whether their products have undergone these critical safety assessments and are actually regulated products with registration to the Cosmetic Notification Portals.
This gap is a significant concern for consumer safety, So how can we simplify the process for consumers to identify products that may pose a threat?