How colour cosmetics came to be regulated

There is a document, running to many pages of tables, that governs what colour a lipstick may be. It is not a style guide. It is an annex, and it lists colourants by index number, gives the applications each is permitted in, sets maximum concentrations, and notes any conditions. It is tedious to read and it is the single most important artefact in the modern cosmetics industry, which is why almost nobody writing about beauty has looked at one.

Before the list

For most of the history of cosmetics the question of what could go into a product had one answer: whatever the maker chose. Guild oversight, where it existed, set some standards of quality but did not operate a toxicology. Poisons legislation, which developed across the nineteenth century, took a different approach entirely. It named specific dangerous substances, arsenic prominently among them, and restricted their sale, requiring registers, signatures and, in some formulations, the presence of a witness. Britain's nineteenth century pharmacy and poisons legislation is a genuinely important strand of consumer protection history, and it worked on the principle of a negative list: these things are dangerous, control them.

A negative list has a structural weakness. It only covers what somebody has already identified as harmful. The nineteenth century produced an unprecedented flood of new synthetic organic compounds, particularly dyes derived from coal tar, and a negative list has nothing to say about a compound invented last year.

The consequences of that gap show up across the period. Arsenic based pigments, most famously the copper arsenite greens developed in the early nineteenth century, went into wallpaper, artificial flowers and dress fabrics, and sickened the people who made and wore them. Arsenic complexion wafers were advertised for sale, and the advertisements survive in newspaper archives. Mercury compounds appeared in skin lightening preparations, a use that persisted into the twentieth century and, in unregulated supply chains, well beyond it.

The case that changed the law

The most consequential single episode in this history took place in the United States in the 1930s. A coal tar based eyelash and eyebrow dye was sold containing a derivative of paraphenylenediamine. Users suffered severe eye injuries, including ulceration and, in reported cases, blindness. The regulator of the day had no authority over cosmetics at all: the 1906 federal food and drugs legislation did not cover them.

The episode became a central exhibit in the campaign for stronger law, and it contributed directly to the passage of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 1938, which brought cosmetics within federal jurisdiction for the first time and established a regime for the certification of colour additives. The American regulator's own historical material describes this sequence, and it is one of the better documented cases of a specific injury producing a specific statute.

The positive list

The approach that emerged, and which is now standard in Britain, the European Union and many other markets, inverts the older logic. Rather than listing what is forbidden, the law lists what is allowed. A colourant may be used in a cosmetic only if it appears on the permitted list, and then only in the applications and at the concentrations specified. There are typically separate columns for products applied around the eyes, for products in contact with mucous membranes, for rinse off products and for products that stay on the skin, because exposure differs and the assessment differs with it.

Two further devices complete the system. A list of prohibited substances covers materials that may not be used at all, which is where lead and mercury compounds now sit. And a list of restricted substances covers materials permitted subject to conditions. The whole apparatus is maintained by scientific committees whose opinions are published, which means the reasoning behind a restriction is in the public record, a fact that is genuinely useful and almost entirely unknown to consumers.

In Britain this framework was carried over into domestic law after the United Kingdom left the European Union, with the annexes retained and subsequently amended separately. The practical effect is two closely related but diverging regimes, and the divergence is now large enough that a formulator selling into both markets must check both.

The most radical idea in cosmetics safety is not any particular ban. It is the reversal of the burden: nothing goes on a face until somebody has assessed it.

What the system does not do

Three limits are worth stating plainly, because the existence of a permitted list is often taken to mean more than it does.

It regulates colourants, not claims. What a product says about itself falls under advertising and consumer protection rules, which in Britain means the codes administered by the advertising regulator and the general law on misleading commercial practices. Those are a separate system and they were built for separate reasons.

It regulates products placed on the market lawfully. It has limited purchase on goods sold through informal channels, imported personally or bought from sellers outside the jurisdiction. Every significant contamination case of recent decades has involved supply chains that route around the system rather than through it.

It is not a guarantee of individual tolerance. A permitted colourant at a permitted concentration can still cause a reaction in a particular person. The list is a population level judgement about acceptable risk, and it was never designed to be anything else.

Why this is a cultural story

The annexes look like the least cultural document imaginable. They are in fact a precise record of what a society decided it would tolerate on a human face, revised whenever new evidence arrived, with the reasoning attached. Read historically they show the moment when the answer to what is in this stopped being a matter of the maker's discretion and became a matter of public record. That shift is as significant in the history of appearance as any change of fashion, and it happened because people were harmed first. The same pattern, harm then rule, runs through the lead story and through the wider record of cosmetic injury.

Where to look

Readers who want to go further should start with the holdings themselves rather than with summaries of them. The legislation.gov.uk and the US Food and Drug Administration both publish catalogue and research material relevant to this article. Both links are given for reference only. Neither institution has been assessed by us, neither has any connection to this magazine, and nothing here is an endorsement of any organisation.