Brussels, 14/02/2014 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission is considering making changes to the European regulation on cosmetic products to ban certain fragrance allergens present in perfume. The public consultation launched on Thursday 13 February aims to gather as many contributions as possible on how it plans to proceed to follow up the conclusions of the Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (CSSC) of the EU, which acknowledged in July 2012 that three allergens -HICC, atranol and chloroatranol - are not safe and that consumers should be informed of the presence of additional allergens in cosmetic products.
This public consultation will focus only on cutaneous allergens, also known as contact allergens, which may be synthetic chemicals or natural substances. It will not look at substances which can cause respiratory allergies.
For the time being, the Commission has proposed: - a ban on HICC, atranol and choroatranol in cosmetics; - that additional allergens be subject to the obligation of individual labelling on the package of a cosmetic product, in other words they have to be mentioned in the list of ingredients, in addition to the words “parfum” or “aroma”. Because of the widespread use of fragrances, it may be very difficult to avoid them all. It is therefore important to avoid those to which a person is already sensitised, the Commission states.
In its conclusions, the Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety states that, given the number of people who reacted positively in patch tests, 12 single chemicals and eight natural extracts were identified as substances of special concern. On this basis, it was suggested that concentration limits in the cosmetic product be laid down for these 12 chemicals, even when they are present in natural extracts.
The European Commission sought the opinion of the CSSC with a view to revising the annexes of the regulation on cosmetic products (containing the list of fragrance allergens and additional substances), which has not been updated since 2003.
The conclusions of the CSSC have already given rise to informal consultations with representatives of industry, consumer associations, healthcare professionals and the member states of the EU. The results of the public consultation will be fed into the proposed changes to the regulation. (AN/transl.fl)