Saudi Arabia's Cosmetic Ingredient Rules Explained: SFDA Prohibited Ingredients List

Saudi Arabia regulates cosmetic ingredients through one national authority, one Gulf-wide technical standard, and one product notification system. A formulator selling into the Saudi market needs to check all three, because the ingredient rule, the labeling rule and the market-entry rule live in different places and are maintained differently. This article sets out what each piece actually says, what the site's imported SFDA data does and does not contain, and three worked examples drawn from live records.

Who regulates cosmetics in Saudi Arabia

The Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) is the regulator for cosmetics, alongside food, drugs and medical devices. Cosmetics are governed by the Law of Cosmetic Products, promulgated by Royal Decree No. M/49, and its Implementing Regulation. The law establishes SFDA's authority to set technical requirements, license facilities, and control which products may be imported or sold; the detailed ingredient and labeling requirements are set out in the Gulf technical regulation SFDA applies, not in the decree text itself.

The Gulf technical regulation SFDA applies: GSO 1943

Saudi Arabia is a member of the GCC Standardization Organization (GSO), and cosmetics sold in the Kingdom must comply with the Gulf technical regulation for cosmetic product safety, published as GSO 1943, titled Cosmetic Products - Safety Requirements of Cosmetics and Personal Care Products. The current edition (Edition 4) was approved in 2024, replacing GSO 1943:2021. Its stated scope covers general safety requirements, and labeling and packaging requirements, for cosmetics and personal care products, with an illustrative product list in an annex.

Secondary industry sources describe GSO 1943's ingredient annexes as built on the same structure as the EU Cosmetics Regulation, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009: a list of substances that may not form part of a cosmetic product's composition, a list of substances subject to restrictions, and separate lists of permitted colouring agents, preservatives and UV filters. Read GSO 1943 itself, through the GSO or SFDA store pages, before relying on any secondary description of its annex contents; this article does not reproduce annex text it has not itself verified against the standard.

What the SFDA prohibited and restricted ingredient lists actually contain

SFDA publishes its ingredient position through a set of live, searchable web pages rather than a single downloadable annex document. The prohibited ingredients list, at sfda.gov.sa/en/ProhibitedIngredientsList, is a paginated table of chemical names and CAS numbers, each with a details link; at the time of writing it ran to 175 pages of results. The same section of the SFDA site links out to a separate Restricted Substances List, and to separate Allowed Colorants, Allowed Preservatives and Allowed UV Filters lists. In other words, SFDA's own presentation already mirrors the five-way split (prohibited, restricted, colourants, preservatives, UV filters) that GSO 1943's annex structure is reported to use.

cosingchecker.com imports these SFDA pages as dated, source-linked records. As of this snapshot, the site holds 2,090 published Saudi Arabia rules, split between prohibited and restricted status, each carrying the SFDA detail-page URL it was read from. That count, and every number in this article, can be checked directly against the site's own API: a GET to /api/v1/jurisdictions/ returns published_rule_count for Saudi Arabia, and /api/v1/jurisdictions/sa/rules/?page=1 returns the individual records with their source_url fields.

Product notification: eCosma

Ingredient compliance is only half of Saudi market entry. Before a cosmetic product can be imported or sold, it must be notified (listed) with SFDA through eCosma, the authority's electronic cosmetics notification system, launched in 2015. Notification is submitted by a locally licensed Saudi importer or distributor with an SFDA-inspected warehouse; a foreign brand cannot notify directly and must work through that local party. The submission covers the manufacturer, the product's full composition, its label in English and Arabic, and a certificate of analysis. SFDA operates this as a declaration-based listing procedure: it issues a notification number without necessarily reviewing the file first, then enforces compliance afterward, and third-party guidance describes shipments that arrive before a notification number is issued as being rejected at customs. eCosma is the gate that a formulated product must pass through; the prohibited and restricted lists are what its formula is checked against, by the notifying company and by SFDA's post-market enforcement.

How the Saudi lists relate to the EU annexes

Because GSO 1943 is reported to follow the EU Cosmetics Regulation's annex structure, some SFDA prohibited and restricted entries can be expected to correspond to EU Annex II (prohibited) and Annex III (restricted) entries by CAS number - but that has not been measured across the list here. That correspondence is a starting point, not a guarantee: GSO 1943 is a separate legal instrument on its own update cycle, SFDA's own published pages are the binding Saudi source, and a substance's EU Annex status on a given day is not proof of its current Saudi status, or the reverse. cosingchecker.com's own market-divergence and market-compare pages exist for exactly this comparison: cosingchecker.com/market-divergence/ surfaces ingredients whose status differs between markets, and cosingchecker.com/market-compare/ lets a reader put two jurisdictions' records for the same substance side by side. The Saudi jurisdiction's own reference page is at cosingchecker.com/regulations/sa/.

Three worked examples from the site's Saudi records

Formaldehyde (CAS 50-00-0). The site's Saudi record lists formaldehyde as prohibited, sourced from the SFDA prohibited list, page 158, row 1, with a direct SFDA detail-page URL. In the EU data on the same site, formaldehyde is EU Annex II entry 1577, prohibited under Regulation (EU) 2019/831, and flagged as CMR Category 1B carcinogenic and Category 2 mutagenic. Here the Saudi and EU positions line up.

Hydroquinone (CAS 123-31-9). This is the more instructive case. The site's Saudi data carries two separate hydroquinone records, imported from two different SFDA source pages: one from the SFDA prohibited list (page 134, row 5) and one from the SFDA restricted list (page 2, row 1), both citing the same CAS number. In the EU data, hydroquinone is likewise split: EU Annex II entry 1339 prohibits it generally, with the exception of entry 14 in Annex III, and that Annex III entry 14 separately restricts hydroquinone to 0.02% in professional-use artificial nail systems, under Regulation (EC) No 344/2013. The Saudi prohibited-plus-restricted pairing tracks that same general-prohibition-with-a-carved-out-exception pattern, but a reader relying on the site's Saudi records alone sees two flat entries, not the cross-reference; the cross-reference is legible from the EU Annex II text and has to be checked against the current SFDA restricted-list detail page to see whether the same carve-out, or a different one, applies in Saudi Arabia today.

(1-Hydroxyethylidene)diphosphonic acid, i.e. etidronic acid (CAS 2809-21-4). The site's Saudi record lists this substance and its salts as restricted, from the SFDA restricted list, page 7, row 5, again with a source URL to the corresponding SFDA detail page. This is a case where the site's imported record correctly signals a restriction exists, without stating what the concentration limit or use conditions are; for that, the SFDA detail page itself is the only source.

Why the Saudi records carry no separate conditions text, and what that means for a reader

Every one of the 2,090 published Saudi records on cosingchecker.com carries no conditions text - all 42 pages of the list were checked for this article. This is a description of the import, not of Saudi law: SFDA's prohibited and restricted list pages, as published, present a chemical name, a CAS number and a details link per row, and the site's snapshot captures status (prohibited or restricted) and a source_url to that details page, but does not re-transcribe whatever concentration limits, product-type restrictions or warning text SFDA may publish on the linked detail page itself.

For a reader, this has one practical consequence: on the Saudi list, "restricted" means SFDA restricts the substance in some way, and the substance's specific limit, permitted use or required warning is not represented in the site's record. It has to be read from the SFDA source_url on that record, or from GSO 1943 directly. Treat every Saudi entry on this site as identity evidence, confirmation that SFDA has published a rule for this exact CAS number, under this exact status, as of the recorded snapshot date, not as the full text of that rule and not as a safe/unsafe verdict. The same caution applies to "prohibited" entries: prohibited is the status SFDA assigns, but any grandfathering, exemption or product-type carve-out that SFDA's own detail page might record is outside the imported record and has to be read from the source.

Checking this yourself

Every figure in this article can be reproduced from the live API. The Saudi Arabia jurisdiction summary, including its regulator name, source URL and published rule count, comes from a GET to /api/v1/jurisdictions/. The individual records, including status, source_reference and source_url, come from /api/v1/jurisdictions/sa/rules/?page=N. Cross-jurisdiction comparisons for a specific CAS number, such as the formaldehyde and hydroquinone examples above, come from /api/v1/entries/?cas=50-00-0 and /api/v1/entries/?cas=123-31-9 for the EU Annex side, and from the ingredient jurisdiction endpoint for the Saudi side. None of these are substitutes for SFDA's own pages or for GSO 1943's own text; they are a way to locate the right SFDA detail page quickly, and to see at a glance where Saudi Arabia's published status for a substance sits next to the EU's.

Sources

• SFDA Prohibited Ingredients List — https://www.sfda.gov.sa/en/ProhibitedIngredientsList
• Royal Decree No. M/49, Implementing Regulation of the Cosmetic Products Law (Lexis Middle East reference copy) — https://www.lexismiddleeast.com/law/SaudiArabia/RoyalDecree_M49_1436/en
• GSO 1943:2024, Cosmetic Products - Safety Requirements of Cosmetics and Personal Care Products, GCC Standardization Organization store page — https://www.gso.org.sa/store/standards/GSO:871899/GSO%201943:2024?lang=en
• GCC Technical Regulation for Cosmetic Products (reference copy) — https://chemexcil.in/uploads/tbts/GCC_Technical_Regulation_for_Cosmetic_Products.pdf
• What is eCOSMA Registration? — Freyr Solutions — https://www.freyrsolutions.com/what-is-ecosma-registration
• Cosmetics Registration in Saudi Arabia (SFDA eCosma): Notification Requirements and Process — MRG — https://mrg.com.sa/en/knowledge-hub/cosmetics-registration-saudi-arabia-ecosma
• EU Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products, Annexes II and III — EUR-Lex — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02009R1223-20240301
• Commission Regulation (EU) 2019/831 (formaldehyde, Annex II entry 1577) — EUR-Lex — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32019R0831
• Commission Regulation (EC) No 344/2013 (hydroquinone, Annex II entry 1339 and Annex III entry 14) — EUR-Lex — https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32013R0344
• cosingchecker.com Saudi Arabia jurisdiction page — https://cosingchecker.com/regulations/sa/
• cosingchecker.com market divergence — https://cosingchecker.com/market-divergence/
• cosingchecker.com market compare — https://cosingchecker.com/market-compare/
• cosingchecker.com API: jurisdictions — https://cosingchecker.com/api/v1/jurisdictions/
• cosingchecker.com API: Saudi Arabia rules — https://cosingchecker.com/api/v1/jurisdictions/sa/rules/?page=1