What counts as a cosmetic
The Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940 defines a cosmetic as anything meant to be rubbed, poured, sprinkled or sprayed on the body to cleanse, beautify, promote attractiveness or alter appearance. Creams, lipsticks, shampoos, hair dyes, henna cones, toothpaste, soap and sunscreen are all cosmetics. The moment a product claims to treat a disease or condition it becomes a drug, with a different licence and a different standard of proof. That line, drawn in Rule 36, is behind most of CDSCO's cosmetics actions in 2025 and 2026.
Who does what
The Cosmetics Rules 2020 (G.S.R. 763(E), 15 Dec 2020) replaced the cosmetics parts of the 1945 rules. They divide the work in two.
- State licensing authorities license every Indian manufacturer (Form COS-8, or COS-9 for a loan licence), inspect factories, draw samples from the market and run the state drug-testing laboratories. A 2025 amendment (Rule 31A) lets them suspend or cancel a licence after a hearing, with an appeal to the state government within 90 days.
- CDSCO's cosmetics division, acting as the Central Licensing Authority under the Drugs Controller General of India, registers every imported cosmetic (Rule 12, Forms COS-1 and COS-2), cancels registrations (Rule 16), issues public notices and alerts, and runs the Central Cosmetics Laboratory, which settles disputed state results.
There is no central register of Indian cosmetic products. A manufacturer's licence covers categories, not individual products, which is why enforcement runs on sampling.
What may go in
The Rules do not carry their own list of banned ingredients. Rule 39 adopts the Bureau of Indian Standards' IS 4707: Part 1 lists the 154 permitted colourants, Part 2 lists about 1,614 prohibited substances in Annex A and about 313 restricted ones with limits in Annex B (2025 edition). The Ninth Schedule makes 37 product standards mandatory, such as IS 8481 for oxidation hair dyes, IS 5339 for infant powder and IS 17318 for henna cones.
A few limits are written into the Rules directly: mercury no more than 1 ppm as a trace (70 ppm as a preservative in eye-area products); lead no more than 20 ppm and arsenic no more than 2 ppm in any colour; hexachlorophene banned except in soap up to 1 per cent; lead and arsenic compounds banned as colourants. Animal testing of cosmetics has been banned since May 2014 and the import of animal-tested cosmetics since October 2014; both bans continue as Rules 39(7) and 18(4).
What a lab result means
State labs test market samples against the product standard and the Rules. CDSCO publishes the failures every month in its "not of standard quality" alert, in the same table as drugs and devices. The reason column tells you what kind of failure it is:
- Mercury, lead, a prohibited amine, a hidden drug: a safety failure. The product contains something it may not.
- Microbial count, total viable count, yeast and mould: contamination in manufacture or filling. Serious for products used near eyes or on broken skin.
- pH, loss on drying, total fatty substance, break load, assay of a declared ingredient: a quality failure against the standard. The product is not what it says it is, which may or may not matter for safety.
- Does not conform to claim: the label promises something the lab could not reproduce.
One row is one batch. The same product can appear many times if a lab sampled several batches, and a manufacturer can ask for a retest at the central laboratory. A failed test gives the state authority grounds to act on the licence; it does not ban the product by itself.
Imports
Every imported cosmetic must be registered with CDSCO before import, product by product, and the pack must carry the importer's name and the registration number. That rule is what the 2026 actions rest on: Kult App lost 27 registrations for label mismatches, Skintl Enterprises lost its registrations for selling unregistered products, and the Goree and Chandni alert of September 2026 concerns creams that were never registered at all. Since May 2025 nothing may be imported from Pakistan in any case.
How to use this section
The dated list gathers every CDSCO alert, cancellation, state order and named lab failure. The failed lab tests page pulls the cosmetics rows out of CDSCO's monthly alerts automatically. Brand pages say what is on record for a brand, including when the answer is nothing. And the fact-checks answer the "is it banned" questions people ask most.