Hello Senator XXX!

Recently, H.R.5786 â�� The Safe Cosmetics Act of 2010 has come to my attention as a bill that is currently making its way through Congress. Overall, this bill is a robust and excellent response to current issues which plague the woefully unregulated cosmetics industry. It’s hopeful to see that after letting these sorts of businesses run around unregulated and unaccountable during the Bush years, we are finally making them work for families instead of themselves.

Much like previous bills design to regulate the food industry, however, there are some problems with the bill concerning some unforeseen impacts it may have on small business owners. Companies such as [local business] and [local business] come to mind. Most of the most onerous and expensive parts of the bill exempt small businesses via a under $1,000,000 clause. However, one aspect of the bill which does not exempt small cosmetic companies is a clause which requires companies to test every finished product before being sold. This type of official laboratory test would be highly cost prohibitive for small businesses. If by “tested”, HR 5786 does not mean an official laboratory test, that is not clear from the legislation and could be clarified in the final bill.

The other troubling piece is a provision that would require businesses to notify the FDA when they add new products to their lineup within 60 days. This short of a timeline could be onerous for small businesses to deal with. I think that lengthening the timeline (perhaps to within a year, so that businesses could annually make a “catalog” of new products and their ingredients) would be a more reasonable and measured approach.

I hope you will consider these small changes to an otherwise robust piece of legislation to help our soap and cosmetic makers.

Sincerely,
Katherine

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as a somewhat unrelated aside, I recently read that loose mineral powders are much less safe than pressed powders, since they encourage greater absorption of nano particles into the body. I tried to find where I read that, but I didn’t have any luck. :C I’ll see if I can dig it up sometime, but I thought it was something you might be interested in looking into, since most of your cosmetics are loose, not pressed mineral powders.

Admittedly, I skimmed through a lot of that. But what I can tell you is that I am GMP trained and certified (no clue on how to get re-certified, though) to FDA standards for pharmaceuticals production. I am familiar with some of the things they are asking for, to some degree.

Are they requiring testing not in-house? I wonder what the requirements are for that. Perhaps I could be your staff microbiologist and test your products. You don’t pay me, so I’m not technically an employee. I doubt the FDA would like that, though.

Where it comes to testing: People will hate me for this, but I actually do believe in animal testing, in part – mostly for pharma purposes, but that’s because it is what I am familiar with. You absolutely cannot ever, EVER get clean, well-documented genetic lineage from human trials, which is why human trials are the last things done before FDA approval, and a good part of the reason why it will take 9-12 years for a product to get approved and on the market. Tens of billions of dollars are spent in development, and only a handful ever actually make it to market. A lot of ideas get tested and scrapped along the way. If it takes genetically engineered lab rats, monkeys, or whatever to do that, then I am okay with that. It sucks, but it’s a necessity. Just about everything we use has been tested in some format or another, at some point in time – every medicine we take, every food product we use, *everything* has been tested to some degree, it seems. I have asked a lot of questions about that along the way, from the anti-animal testing stance, as well as talking to vet techs that worked with the animals in question (I know a gal that’s been with Eli Lily for nearly 20 years, and though she’s in graphic design now, she used to work as a vet tech for them in Greenfield, IN. She gave me great insight as to their purpose, and just how VERY regulated it is. That falls under GLPs – Good Lab Practices).

Thing is, as a smaller company, you have the ability to purchase products that have -already- been tested and deemed safe for human use. That’s how a lot of products manage to make it on the market and state that they have never been tested on animals – because the products contained within already have been tested, by another company, at some point in history.

What I suspect that they would be looking for is something like bioburden testing. I can’t imagine that mineral makeup would be a great environment for something like staph, strep, etc to grow in, but you can’t say for certain until it’s been tested.

Rambling aside, I wonder if this will end up like the lead-free whatever they were trying to crack down on a year or so ago, when small businesses would’ve been required to test all their products for lead. I remember the crafting community was all up in arms over it, and it seems to have fizzled. While I don’t necessarily think it’s a horrible thing if Revlon needs to disclose just what precisely is in their lipstick, and I don’t think it’s that bad to have the testing done, I hope certain provisions can be made for small businesses like yours.