China Issues Mandatory Cosmetic Safety Standard, Retiring 40-Year-Old Predecessor

The new standard GB 7916—2026, issued by the Standardization Administration as a mandatory national standard, replaces the "Cosmetic Hygiene Standard" in effect for nearly 40 years. The renaming from "hygiene" to "safety" marks a regulatory pivot toward full-chain safety management.

When the old standard was introduced in 1987, China had just over 70 cosmetic companies; today that number exceeds 6,000, with market scale surpassing 1.1 trillion yuan in 2025 for the first time. Product categories have proliferated from basic skincare into active serums, children's makeup, and specialized eye-and-lip lines, making formula complexity and raw material sourcing fundamentally different from what the old framework was designed to govern.

For B2B procurement and brand teams, the mandatory nature of the new standard means raw material traceability, formulation safety assessment, and finished-product compliance testing must all be recalibrated against updated requirements. Proactive compliance alignment will be a decisive variable in the next phase of supply-chain competition.