(Yicai) Feb. 7 -- The National Medical Products Administration of China unveiled new measures to support innovation in cosmetic ingredients by simplifying safety assessment requirements.

For new ingredients used for the first time globally, some toxicological tests and long-term human safety trials can be waived if companies conduct scientific safety assessments, the NMPA said yesterday. For ingredients with a well-documented history of safe use, existing data will be better utilized and the safety evaluation will be simplified, it added.

The new policy could help companies cut costs, industry insiders told Yicai.

Under previous requirements, cosmetic firms had to repeatedly conduct toxicology tests, which incurred costs and consumed significant time, a relevant executive said to Yicai. Even when comprehensive safety usage data was already available, these tests had to be redone to use the ingredients in cosmetics, the person added.

Since China launched its new cosmetic regulations in 2021, there have been 207 new domestic cosmetic ingredient registrations, according to data released by the NMPA.

For freckle-removing and whitening products, the management approach to raw material safety assessment data should be optimized to allow the use of regulatory authorities' published information on ingredients from marketed products and three years of usage history as part of the assessment basis, a cosmetics expert pointed out.

Editor: Martin Kadiev