About
The byline on everything here is the publication name, The Cosmetic Record. There is no editorial board, no panel and no staff list, because there is none to list. What there is instead is a document behind every sentence.
What this site is
The Cosmetic Record is a small, independently published site about cosmetic products: how ingredient labels work, what the regulations in the European Union, the United States and Brazil actually require, and what the published evidence does and does not support. It exists to do one thing well: put a source you can open next to every factual claim, so that a reader who disagrees can argue with the evidence instead of with us.
Who writes it
The Cosmetic Record is written and published by one small independent website publisher based in the United States. We are not cosmetic chemists, not dermatologists, not toxicologists, not formulators and not lawyers, and we do not claim to be. We have no laboratory and no professional qualification in this field, and nothing here is medical or legal advice.
Because we have no credentials to lean on, everything here is built the only way it can be: from primary documents — regulation texts, annex entries, committee opinions and published papers — quoted, linked and dated, so that you can check us. If a claim on this site has no link, treat it as an opinion and weigh it accordingly. Where the documents disagree, we show the disagreement. Where we could not open a document, we say so on the page instead of paraphrasing somebody's summary of it. How we source sets out what counts as a source here and what does not.
Why an information site rather than a review site
A personal review expires the moment a formula is reformulated, and a reader cannot check it. A rule, a concentration limit, a committee conclusion and a published study can all be checked by anyone, indefinitely. We think the second kind of page is more useful, and we know it is the only honest kind for a publisher in our position.
About this domain name
This site is published on testandoprodutoscosmeticos.com, a domain that previously carried a Brazilian Portuguese beauty blog of the same name — roughly, “Testing Cosmetic Products” — which published from 2008 until December 2016 and then stopped. That blog is not continued here. We are not its author, we have no connection to whoever wrote it, and none of its writing is reproduced anywhere on this site. Between 2019 and 2026 the domain was used by two unrelated occupants — an automated content generator, and later an online gambling operator — and neither has anything to do with this site either. We bought the domain, and we publish something different on it in a different language. Addresses from the 2008–2016 blog are forwarded to whichever article here answers the same underlying question; often there is no close match, and those go to the article index. Many addresses from the later occupants deliberately do not resolve at all. The article index stays at /artigos/ because that is where the old links point.
Este site em inglês não é a continuação do blog Testando Produtos Cosméticos, que publicou de 2008 a 2016; compramos o domínio e publicamos outra coisa nele.
The change of hands, and the list of which legacy addresses were forwarded where, is recorded as the first entry in the corrections log.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, say so and it gets fixed in the article, with the change noted, dated, in the corrections log. Write to the contact form.