What you missed at this year’s Cosmetic Regulations Workshop

The 35th annual event was put on in cooperation with The US Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Cosmetics & Colors, the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, The US Federal Trade Commission, and The National Advertising Division.

Notable people ​

Speakers at the workshop included Linda Katz, who works at the FDA as director of the Office of Cosmetics & Colors, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition; Deborah Marrone, assistant regional director for the FTC’s Northeast Region; consultants like Howard Baker and Holly Young; and Annie M. Ugurlayan, a senior staff attorney with the National Advertising Division.

ICMAD president and CEO Pam Busiek opened the event and shared an update of the group’s current activities and offerings. 

In attendance were ICMAD members and non-members alike. 70 people (give or take) were on hand for the workshops last week at the Harmonie Club on New York City’s Upper East Side.

Cases and concerns​

The presentations and panel discussions at the Cosmetic Regulation Workshop explored how regulations and legislation get made, how the rules in place now function, where challenges lie within the current monographs and guidelines, and cases that illustrate when and how regulations are enforced by the various agencies overseeing the beauty industry.

For instance Annie M. Ugurlayan of the Better Business Bureau’s National Advertising Division spoke, near the end of the day, about her group’s enforcement activities. Ugurlayan explained that 80% of the cases that the Division handles are initiated as competitor challenges. The remaining 20% come from the group’s monitoring activities.

Anti-aging stands out as a category where comparatively few competitor challenges are brought, Ugurlayan said. So, “most of those are brought by ASRC [the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council] itself.”​

Regulations pipeline​

The Personal Care Products Safety Act, introduced just over a year ago is expected to have a hearing this June. Should the Act go into effect, there will be a lot of new material to discuss at next year’s Cosmetic Regulations Workshop.

The Act would require the FDA to evaluate at least five personal care and cosmetic ingredients each year to ascertain whether each is safe for use in product formulations. And, the Act outlines which five will be review first: diazolidinyl urea, lead acetate, methylene glycol or formaldehyde, propylparaben, and quaternium-15.