Decoded Korea

Every few months, a post goes viral claiming that Europe bans more than a thousand cosmetic ingredients while the US bans barely a dozen. The numbers are usually right, but they compare only two markets. We wanted the full picture, so we counted the ingredient restrictions in all 10 markets our database covers. The gap is wider than the usual comparison suggests. The EU accounts for 5,301 ingredient restrictions in our data. The US has 111. The eight markets in between fall into a pattern that says more about regulatory philosophy than about safety. The ranking Each number below counts how many cosmetic ingredient restrictions — prohibitions plus concentration limits — each market has in our regulatory database. Rank Market Total Prohibited Restricted 1 EU 5,301 4,039 1,262 2 ASEAN 4,843 3,891 952 3 China 4,145 3,373 772 4 Korea 4,046 3,356 690 5 Brazil 4,022 3,220 802 5 Argentina 4,022 3,220 802 7 Taiwan 2,137 1,459 678 8 Canada 1,947 1,699 248 9 Japan 386 95 ...