Laws on Selling Homemade Beauty Products UK

You don't need a licence to sell homemade beauty products in the UK, but you do need three things before the first sale: a safety assessment signed by a qualified safety assessor, a named Responsible Person, and a product notification submitted through the SCPN service. Labelling and record-keeping follow from those. The rules apply the same way whether you sell one bar a month on Etsy or a full range through a shop.

That combination — no licence, but a real compliance obligation — is what catches most people out. There's no form to fill in that makes you "approved", so it's easy to assume nothing is required.

This covers cosmetic products sold in Great Britain. This is not legal advice.

What Counts as a Beauty Product

The rules bite on anything applied to the external body — skin, hair, nails, lips, teeth — for cleaning, perfuming, changing appearance, protecting, or keeping in good condition.

In practice, for a home maker, that means:

• Soap, cleansing bars, body wash
• Bath bombs, bath salts, bath melts
• Balms, butters, lotions, creams, serums
• Lip balm and lip scrubs
• Face masks, scrubs, toners
• Hair oils, shampoo bars, conditioners
• Perfume and body sprays worn on skin
• Deodorants, nail products

What it does not cover is your candle and home-fragrance line. Candles, wax melts, reed diffusers and room sprays are chemical mixtures under GB CLP, with an entirely separate set of obligations — hazard classification, pictograms, signal words. If you make both, you're running two compliance tracks that don't overlap. Our guide to CLP labels covers that side.

A common grey area is a "room and body spray" sold as dual-purpose. Marketing it for use on skin pulls it into cosmetics; marketing it purely as a room product keeps it under CLP. Selling it as both means meeting both sets of requirements.

The Five Obligations, in Order

1. Get a safety assessment

This is the gate everything else sits behind. The operative requirement:

"Before making a cosmetic product available to consumers, its safety must be checked by a qualified safety assessor."

The assessor must hold relevant qualifications — the assessment is not something you can do yourself, however well you know your recipe. What you can do is prepare the documentation that feeds it: exact percentages, INCI names, supplier specifications and allergen data for every ingredient, and your manufacturing method.

The output is a Cosmetic Product Safety Report (CPSR). It tells you the safe formulation limits, any use restrictions, warnings that must appear on the label, and the stability position that determines your durability marking.

The guidance draws no distinction by business size, production volume, or whether you sell as a hobby. There is no small-batch exemption in the requirement as written.

2. Be (or appoint) the Responsible Person

Every cosmetic placed on the GB market needs a Responsible Person established in the UK, accountable for the product's compliance and named on the label. If you make and sell in the UK, that's you and your business address.

The Responsible Person holds the Product Information File and is the point of contact for enforcement authorities.

3. Notify through SCPN

Before the product goes on sale:

"you must notify your cosmetic products using the Submit cosmetic product notifications service"

Notification is done online through the SCPN service. It's per-product, so a range of six scents may mean six notifications depending on how the formulations differ. Notification has to happen before the product is made available — treat it as a hard gate before your first sale, not something to catch up on afterwards.

4. Label correctly

The label requirements are specific. GOV.UK sets them out as:

"The container and any packaging must be labelled with:

• the name and address of the Responsible Person
• the country of origin if the product is imported to the UK
• the weight or volume
• the date which the cosmetic product can be used until
• any precautions for use
• an identification number (for example batch number)
• what the cosmetic product does
• the ingredients - these can be provided solely on the packaging. Note that nanomaterial ingredients must be followed by '(nano)'"

Ingredients use INCI glossary names in descending order of weight as added, and fragrance allergens above the threshold are named individually — 0.001% for leave-on products, 0.01% for rinse-off. There's a fuller walkthrough in our cosmetic labelling requirements guide.

5. Keep the Product Information File

The PIF holds the CPSR, product description, manufacturing method, evidence for any claimed effect, and safety data. It has to be kept available to enforcement authorities and retained for ten years after the last batch was made available on the market.

This is where good batch records earn their keep — the PIF is only useful if you can connect a product someone bought back to the batch and formulation behind it.

The Order Matters

Doing these out of sequence is the most common expensive mistake. The sequence that avoids rework:

1. Finalise the formulation. Not "roughly this" — the exact percentages you intend to sell.
2. Prepare your documentation. INCI names, supplier data sheets, allergen percentages, method.
3. Commission the safety assessment. This is where changes get costly, which is why 1 and 2 come first.
4. Set up as the Responsible Person. Business registered, address confirmed.
5. Notify via SCPN.
6. Design the label using the assessment's outputs — warnings, durability position, any restrictions.
7. Start selling, keeping batch records from the first pour.

Reformulating after step 3 usually means paying for a reassessment. Makers who tweak a recipe "just slightly" after the CPSR is signed often find that the assessment no longer covers what they're actually selling.

What This Costs in Practice

Safety assessments are priced per formulation and vary widely with complexity — a simple anhydrous balm sits at the low end, an emulsion with multiple actives at the high end. Assessors commonly discount ranges built on a shared base formula, so submitting six scents of one recipe together costs meaningfully less than six separate assessments.

The costs that vary are the safety assessments and your time preparing documentation — SCPN notification isn't where the budget goes. Our guide to cosmetic safety assessment costs breaks down what drives the quote and where makers overpay.

Alongside the Cosmetics Rules

Selling from home also brings the ordinary obligations of running a business: registering with HMRC, product liability insurance (most marketplaces and craft fairs expect it), and consumer-rights compliance on distance selling. Our guide to the laws on selling homemade crafts in the UK covers those, and selling cosmetics from home walks the whole path end to end.

Common Questions

Do I need a licence to sell beauty products in the UK?

No. There's no licence or registration scheme for cosmetics makers. What you need instead is a safety assessment by a qualified assessor, a Responsible Person, an SCPN notification, and compliant labelling — obligations you meet yourself rather than permissions someone grants you.

Can I sell homemade skincare without a CPSR?

No. The requirement is that a product's safety is checked by a qualified safety assessor before it's made available to consumers. There's no exemption for small volumes, hobby selling, or gifting-for-payment.

Does soap count as a cosmetic?

Yes — soap sold for washing skin is a cosmetic product and needs the same assessment, notification and labelling as any other. See our soap labelling requirements guide.

What if I only sell to friends and family?

If money changes hands and the product is being made available to consumers, the obligations apply. The rules key on placing the product on the market, not on how you found the buyer.

Do these rules cover Northern Ireland?

This guide covers Great Britain. Northern Ireland follows EU cosmetics rules, which have diverged in places — if you ship to NI, check the NI position separately rather than assuming the GB answer carries across.

Related Guides

• Selling cosmetics from home in the UK: legal requirements and compliance
• Soap and cosmetics safety assessments: what UK makers need to know
• CPSR certification UK: costs, process, and when you need one
• Cosmetic labelling requirements UK: a plain-English guide

Our free Cosmetic Labelling Checker checks a draft label against the required elements.

CraftCert keeps formulations, INCI names, allergen percentages and batch records organised so the documentation your assessor asks for is already assembled, and your labels come out of the recipe rather than being rebuilt by hand. The safety assessment itself still goes to a qualified assessor. See pricing.

Sources

• GOV.UK — Making cosmetic products available to consumers in Great Britain
• GOV.UK — Submit a cosmetic product notification
• GOV.UK — Regulation 1223/2009 and the Cosmetic Products Enforcement Regulations 2013 (Great Britain)