Women’s Voices for the Earth continues to call attention to cosmetic ingredients’ potential health impacts on users including salon workers, while pushing the Cosmetic Ingredient Review to consider a wider variety of safety information in its assessment work.

“Companies can innovate right now, and they have confidence in these tools, these [non-animal] approaches, and they feel they can put these products on the market safely,” said Erin Hill, CEO and president of the International Collaboration on Cosmetics Safety. “The holdup is that they can’t register these new products, because there’s a lack of confidence in the regulatory community.”

In the year since its establishment, the International Collaboration on Cosmetics Safety has worked to engage with regulators as they build frameworks for assessing cosmetic safety without animal tests. ICCS president and CEO Erin Hill discusses current challenges and what lies ahead.

Hawaii looks to “ease the burden” of finding reef-safe sunscreens by distributing it to sunseekers at beaches. The proposed legislation comes roughly three years after the Aloha State began prohibiting sale of oxybenzone- or octinoxate-containing sunscreen products due to concerns about potential harm to coral.

The US Environmental Protection Agency “is not currently planning a full scope ERA that would include the fate and distribution of UV filters in the environment because the data are currently not available to do so in a defensible manner,” an agency spokesperson said.

While studies are limited regarding the human health effects of PFAS in cosmetic products, efforts to prohibit their use continue gaining steam at the state and federal levels, which could lead to increased litigation.