Claims, CMRs, preservatives, allergens… more than two years after Regulation 1223/2009 came into force, there still remains grey areas and uncertainties about the European Cosmetics Regulation, and it sometimes causes problems to the industry. At the 13th edition of the regulatory congress held last November 18-19 in Chartres, France, Jean-François Roche made an update on the state of the mind and agenda of the European Commission.
Jean-François Roche has been working with the unit responsible for technologies in the medical and cosmetics sectors for a year and a half. This unit used to belong to DG Sanco (now DG Health), but when the Commission’s services were reorganized in January 2015, it was transferred to DG Enterprises, today’s DG Growth (Directorate-General for growth).
According to the speaker, this change has little impact on the management of cosmetics cases.
‘The European Commission has several missions’,
he explained,
‘including the free circulation of products within the European Union, to which DG Growth pays particular attention, especially since it has absorbed a large part of DG Internal Market. As for health, DG Growth has adopted exactly the same approach as DG Health, which means we must manage all the elements, information, and scientific opinions the Commission receives, and which lead us to make decisions on risk management and implement them’.
Jean-François Roche admits this approach may cause some problems. He gave the example of the increased scarcity of the preservatives available in cosmetics, which made DG Growth adopt a new course of action to get more proactive on this issue.
After this introduction, the speaker started to list today’s most …
