The Cosmetics Regulation requires a more thorough report on product safety. This report already existed in the Directive. However, its content shall be enriched and will be more complex, while the workload and the methods used by the safety assessor will dramatically increase. Hence, a need to define again the role of the assessor, with a view to the implementation of the Regulation, on 11 July 2013. Here is the opinion of Philippe Masson, toxicologist, biologist, EVIC France CEO, and of Clarisse Bavoux, toxicologist, pharmacist at Evic. Both they are safety assessors.
Who is a safety assessor?
“A priori, it is a person known as competent in toxicology who is to evaluate the safety of use of the cosmetic products available to the consumers,” Philippe Masson sums up. In the Regulation, the product safety report (Annex I) comprises two parts: “Part A," which displays the cosmetic product safety information data, and “Part B," dealing more directly with the safety assessment of these data.
This refers to the Article 2 of the Directive, “Cosmetic products (…) must not cause damage to human health when applied under normal or reasonably foreseeable conditions of use (…). The assessor’s role, then, is to say, “OK, I give the ‘go-ahead’ signal, or not,” Philippe Masson reminds us.
He or she can be a salary-person, or an outside consultant, but shall be independent of the production and management departments in the company. “Outside assessors may be considered as more reliable; this is not always true. It depends on the expertise of the internal toxicologists. In fact, it does not matter, as far as competence and independence are for real,” Philippe Masson explains. He puts at circa fifty the current number of outside assessors in France.
The Directive was …
