Great Britain cosmetic ingredient regulations

The Cosmetic Products Enforcement Regulations 2013 kept Regulation 1223/2009 in force in Great Britain after EU exit, so the structure a formulator already knows — Annex II for prohibited substances, Annex III for restricted ones, Annexes IV to VI for colourants, preservatives and UV filters — is the same here. What changed is who amends it. The Office for Product Safety and Standards now does that for Great Britain, and the European Commission does it for the EU, on their own timetables.

That divergence is the practical point of this page. When the Commission adds a substance to Annex II, Great Britain does not follow automatically. The reverse holds too. Two lists that began as one copy now differ entry by entry, and the gap widens with each amendment cycle, so a compliance answer for one market is not evidence for the other even when the substance and the wording look identical.

Northern Ireland is not covered here. Under the Windsor Framework it continues to apply the EU regulation, so a product placed on the market across the whole United Kingdom is answering to two rulebooks at once. Check the EU records for that half.

The 2,329 records below carry the status the GB source gives them and nothing more. Where a record is marked restricted, the concentration limit, product-type condition and warning text come from the source as written; where a substance has no record at all, that means no GB entry was resolved here, not that its use has been considered and allowed.