EUROPEAN UNION - Legal framework
The cosmetics, personal care & toiletries industry in the European Union is governed by the European Commission's Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry.
The legal framework set for regulating this sector is the EU Cosmetics Directive 76/768/EEC which was adopted in order to ensure the free circulation of cosmetic products in the internal market and to ensure the safety of cosmetic products placed on it.
A directive is a legislative act of the European Union,which requires Member States to achieve a particular result without dictating the means of achieving it.Directives need, at least in principle, to be transposed into national law and normally leave Member States with a certain amount of leeway as to the exact rules to be adopted; Member States can thus include additional requirements.
The 27 transposing national pieces of legislation in the EU Cosmetics Directive from 1976 represent over 3,500 pages of legal text and had become a patchwork of 55 amendmentswithout coherent terminology which proved to be difficult to implement.
To simplify the legal framework for economic activities in the EU, the Cosmetics Directive was recently reviewed in the form of a recast which codifies the legislative text and its amendments and introduces substantive improvements. The new Cosmetic Products Regulation, EU Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, was adopted on November 30, 2009.