GB 7916-1987Hygienic standard for cosmetics (English PDF)

1 Scope

This standard specifies the hygienic requirements for cosmetics, including the general requirements, the prohibited and restricted substances, the limits of the toxic elements, the microbiological limits and the requirements for the container and the labelling.

It applies to the cosmetics manufactured and sold within the territory of China.

The structure it established

This is the document from which the later Chinese cosmetics hygienic standards and the current supervision regulation inherited their shape, and it is the shape every cosmetics regulation in the world has converged on: a negative list of substances that may never be used, and a restricted list of substances that may be used within a stated limit and under stated conditions and warnings.

To those are added numerical limits on the toxic elements - lead, arsenic and mercury - which arrive as contaminants of the raw materials rather than as ingredients, and microbiological limits on the finished product.

Where the limits tighten

On the products used around the eyes, on the lips and on infants. The eye is not protected by an intact skin barrier, a lip product is swallowed in use, and an infant has neither the mass nor the metabolism of an adult; the microbiological and compositional limits are set accordingly.

The last clauses cover the container, which must not itself contaminate what it holds, and the labelling, which is the only means the user has of knowing what the product contains and how it is to be used.

About this edition

GB 7916-1987 is the current edition. It was issued on 28 May 1987 and has been in force since 1 October 1987.

The interval between issue and effect is the transition period. It exists so that producers, laboratories and buyers can requalify products, revise procedures and use up documentation before the new text becomes the one that applies. The date on this page is the official one from the record of the Standardization Administration.

Classification and status

GB 7916-1987 is classified under ICS 71.100.70. ICS is the International Classification for Standards, the same scheme used by ISO and by the national bodies of most countries, which is what allows a Chinese standard to be placed beside its foreign counterparts on subject rather than on number.

Its Chinese Standard Classification code is CCS C 51. CCS is the domestic scheme, a letter for the sector and two digits for the subject within it, and it is the code by which the standard is filed and searched in China.

The GB prefix marks a mandatory national standard. Compliance is required by law within China: it applies to what is made, sold or imported there, and an inspection body will judge a product against it whether or not a contract names it.

How a Chinese national standard is set out

Chinese national standards are drafted to the rules of GB/T 1.1, which fixes the order in which a standard is set out. The document opens with a foreword recording the issuing bodies, the relationship to any previous edition and the technical committee responsible for it. Clause 1 is the scope. Clause 2 lists the normative references — the other standards that have to be applied together with this one, and without which its requirements cannot be met. Clause 3 gives the terms and definitions. The technical clauses follow: the requirements themselves, the test or measurement methods by which conformity is established, the inspection rules that say how a lot is sampled and judged, and, for a product standard, the provisions on marking, packaging, transport and storage. Annexes, normative or informative, come last.

GB 7916-1987 runs to 15 pages in the English translation. What is delivered is the complete document in that order: every clause, every table, every figure and every annex of the Chinese original, with the same numbering, so that a reference to a clause number in a contract or a test report points to the same place in both languages.

About this English translation

The English edition of GB 7916-1987 is a full translation of the official Chinese text, not a summary, an abstract or a machine rendering left unchecked. Clause and subclause numbers, table and figure numbers and annex letters are those of the original, because they are what a specification, a purchase order or a test report cites.

Technical terms are translated against the vocabulary standards of the same field, so that a term used in GB 7916-1987 reads the same way as in the other Chinese standards it is used beside. Where a term has an established English form in an ISO or IEC document on the same subject, that form is used; where China's term has no foreign counterpart, it is translated literally and the Chinese is kept alongside it rather than replaced by an approximation.

Quantities, units and symbols are carried over unchanged. Chinese standards use SI, so a value in the translation is the value in the original document, not a conversion, and a limit read from the English text is the limit that will be applied by a Chinese inspection body reading the Chinese one.

This page is compiled from the official publication record: the standard number and both titles, the issuing bodies, the dates of issue and effect, the ICS and CCS classification. The requirements, limits, tables and test conditions are in the document itself.