GBEnglishOfficial records available

Great Britain cosmetic ingredient regulations

GB rules must be versioned separately from EU rules as they diverge.

Regulator: Office for Product Safety and Standards
Source language: English
Coverage version: GB retained Regulation 1223/2009 schedules, effective 15 August 2026

What this list is

Great Britain carried EU Regulation 1223/2009 onto its own statute book after Brexit and has amended it separately ever since. The two lists started identical and no longer are, which is why a GB check cannot be answered from an EU one.

2,329 GB records: 1,758 prohibited, 326 restricted, 245 on a positive list.
The regulator is the Office for Product Safety and Standards, not the European Commission.
GB and EU annexes are amended by different bodies on different dates, so they drift apart substance by substance.
A substance absent from the GB list is not thereby permitted — absence is absence of a record, not a decision.

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.

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Official ingredient records

2329 matching records

Permitted list with conditionsBinding ruleOriginal is EnglishOfficial-source import checked

Zinc Oxide (nano)

CAS 1314-13-2 · EC 215-222-5

The consolidated GB Cosmetics Regulation lists this record in Annex VI.

Conditions: 25% · Not to be used in applications that may lead to exposure of the end-user's lungs by inhalation. Only nanomaterials having the following characteristics are allowed: purity ≥ 96%, with wurtzite crystalline structure and physical appearance as clusters that are rod-like, star-like and/or isometric shapes, with impurities consisting only of carbon dioxide and water, whilst any other impurities are less than 1% in total, median diameter of the particle number size distribution D50 (50% of the number below this diameter) > 30 nm and D1 (1% below this size) > 20 nm, water solubility < 50 mg/L uncoated, or coated with triethoxycaprylylsilane, dimethicone, dimethoxydiphenylsilanetriethoxycaprylylsilane cross-polymer, or octyl triethoxy silane.

Source:GB Cosmetics Regulation, Annex VI, entry 30a · version 2026-08-15 · effective Aug. 15, 2026 · source checked 2026-08-30

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