Awareness and consumer habits drive the market
The global market value of natural and organic cosmetics and personal care products is projected to hit $59 billion by 2031, registering a CAGR of 5.3% between 2022 and 2031 (Allied Market Research). This market is growing faster than the overall cosmetics market. As the cosmetics and personal care industry looks towards using more upcycled, organic, vegan, and herbal products, and more natural ingredients, we face various new challenges. According to Euromonitor International, “natural” was the leading product claim in the beauty and personal care categories in 2020.
This market is expected to witness a significant surge in demand, owing in part to rapidly growing urban populations across the globe, the improved lifestyle of urban populations, a rise in health consciousness, more educated consumers and a shift towards sustainability. These are crucial factors that impact the burgeoning demand for organic and natural cosmetics and personal care products.
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, compliant and perform well? Eurofins Cosmetics and Personal Care’s network of laboratories is helping the industry to innovate and improve practices by ensuring their safety, regulatory compliance and performance.
Correct understanding of natural products, products of natural origin and organic products
The definitions of “natural products” and “products of natural origin” are based on the ISO 16218 standard. The natural content or natural origin of the product must be greater than or equal to 95% according to ISO 16128 or any standard with greater or equal requirements. The ISO 16128 standard establishes the method for determining the natural content of natural origin with the categorisation of ingredients into four categories, and provides the calculation methods required to determine the naturalness indexes of ingredients and deduce the % of natural ingredients.
This percentage can then be displayed on the packaging of finished products. For organic products, the requirements that must be met are even higher. To be defined as "organic", a cosmetic product must meet at least one of the required conditions.
Advertising must not attribute a value greater than the real significance to signs, symbols or labels associated with a product.
Thus, one of the first steps to achieving quality natural products is to ensure the effective qualification of raw materials and ingredients by analysing all necessary data and comprehensively assessing their safety.
The importance of qualifying and evaluating raw materials and ingredients
Cosmetic ingredients’ safety must be established and demonstrated through a risk assessment process, in accordance with the requirements of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009.
When the safety evaluator decides 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 assessments and proof of efficacy testing 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, NATRUE folder, labelling review, naturalness index calculations...
- Physico-chemical analyses (heavy metals, allergens, residual solvents, pesticides, assay of proteins, determination of sugars, 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.
