Raw Materials & Ingredients

The importance of qualifying and evaluating Cosmetics and Personal Care raw materials and ingredients

With increasing demand from consumers for new, innovative, safe and high-quality ingredients and raw materials in their cosmetics, how can we ensure that cosmetic products are safe and compliant? Eurofins Cosmetics and Personal Care network of laboratories is working to help the industry innovate and improve practices by ensuring their safety and regulatory compliance.

Cosmetic ingredients’ safety must be established and demonstrated through a risk assessment process, in accordance with the requirements of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009. As the cosmetics and personal care industry looks towards using more upcycled, organic, vegan, and natural ingredients, we face various new challenges.

One of the first steps is to ensure a good qualification of raw materials and ingredients by analysing all necessary data and by assessing their safety comprehensively.

When the safety evaluator considers that the available data is not sufficient to ensure the safety of raw materials and ingredients, or when alerts have been identified in literature, it may be necessary to generate new data by conducting toxicological tests on raw materials and ingredients.

Our teams of experts can support and advise you through the various stages of safety assessment and proof of efficacy for raw materials and ingredients, including:

• Regulatory & Toxicology: toxicological profile, literature search for new ingredients without INCI, support on pre-evaluation and pre-expertise, selecting necessary tests, COSMOS folder, labeling review, naturalness index calculations...
• Physico-chemical analyses (heavy metals, allergens, residual solvents, pesticides, assay of proteins, furocoumarin, vitamins...);
• In vitro safety tests covering skin irritation, eye irritation, sensitising potential, phototoxicity, genotoxicity, endocrine disruptors and transcutaneous/percutaneous passage...;
• Clinical tolerance assessment and clinical efficacy.