What EU chemicals policy could achieve
Ensuring beauty and hygiene products are safer
EU cosmetics legislation: an opportunity to avoid hazardous chemicals?
The Cosmetics Directive is the main EU law that regulates the manufacture and sale of beauty and hygiene products on the European market. This includes make-up and perfume and also products such as sunscreens, toothpaste, deodorants, shampoo and baby care goods, many of which have an important place in our everyday lives.
The main aim of this directive is to ensure that cosmetics are not harmful under normal or foreseeable conditions of use. Over the years since its adoption in 1976, it has been substantially revised.
The European Commission has recently announced new proposals to change the EU cosmetics law to:
- reinforce the responsibility of manufacturers for ensuring the safety of their products,
- simplify the existing regulatory system and
- get rid of certain existing inconsistencies in the law.
Under the new proposals, minimum requirements for product safety assessment have been established to ensure that manufacturers have to prove that their products are safe.
However, as it stands, the proposed law will allow some substances classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic for reproduction (CMR) to be used in products. This weakens the current law in which these substances are auto-matically banned.
HEAL considers that the current ban on existing CMRs should be maintained and that the precautionary principle should be applied in the area of cosmetics. For example, cosmetics should not contain endocrine-disrupting chemicals.
This law is now being discussed in the decision-making institutions of the EU, the Parliament, and the Council. The new law that emerges from the political process is likely to come out in 2009.
More info: Consolidated version of the Cosmetic Directive, http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/cosmetics/html/consolidated_dir.htm
See also: “Cosmetics free from dangerous chemicals” in the BEUC’s 8 priorities for the French Presidency, The European Consumers’ Organisation (BEUC), Paris, 19 June 2008, http://www.beuc.eu
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