China Significant Cosmetic Regulatory Developments

A training course hosted by the CFDA on registration of cosmetics was held on April 27-29. Officials from the CFDA and technical review experts gave lectures to introduce cosmetic regulation in China and offer their guidance on the most important requirements for registration as well as providing solutions to the problems encountered by cosmetic companies when applying for registration. Chemlinked participated in the training and learned firsthand about recent and upcoming regulatory changes. The major issues discussed were:

• Lin Qingbin of CFDA’s cosmetics division remarked that “Regulations concerning the Supervision and Administration over Cosmetics” will be submitted to the State Council soon. The State Council has listed the regulation into its highest level legislative plans. It is likely that the regulation will be released a year after its submission.
• Lin confirmed that the CFDA is formulating the “Guidelines for Safety Assessment of domestic cosmetics” and will try to promulgate the guidelines within the year.
• The devolution of supervisory power on imported non-special use cosmetics from CFDA to provincial FDAs is likely to be cancelled. The filing approach may be changed from submission of paper documents to online record filing.
• Liu Baojun, Official at the Cosmetics Review Center, CFDA, stated that the “Technical Safety Standard for Cosmetics” is likely to be enacted within the year. Now prohibited ingredients newly added into the draft will not allowed to be used in cosmetics despite the draft not coming into force yet.
• Xu Liang, Technical Review Expert, CFDA disclosed that a new version of the “Catalogue of Standard Chinese Name of International Cosmetic Ingredient” will be released soon and more ingredients will be included in the catalogue.
• Lin also stressed that the strengthening of cosmetic ingredient regulation and supervision is a major emphasis of future work. The CFDA will advance the classification and management processes used for cosmetic ingredients of plant origin
• The CFDA is developing a mobile app to encourage public supervision. Once unqualified products are found, the public can directly report it to the CFDA through the app.
• Next the CFDA will strengthen the management of online notification of domestic non-special use cosmetics as a large number of unqualified products were filed on the notification platform. FDAs will clear up the unqualified products and the CFDA will carry out spot checks on all the products filed on the platform. Unqualified companies will be punished accordingly.