SCPN: How to Notify a Cosmetic Product UK

SCPN stands for Submit Cosmetic Product Notifications — the Government service you use to register a cosmetic product before it goes on sale in Great Britain. It is a notification, not an approval: nobody reviews your submission and grants permission, and there is no certificate at the end. You file the product's details, and the record exists so poison centres and enforcement authorities can find it if they need to.

Notification is one of three things that must be in place before your first sale. The other two are a safety assessment (CPSR) signed by a qualified assessor and a named Responsible Person — and both of those have to come first, because SCPN asks for information only they can give you.

This covers cosmetic products placed on the Great Britain market. This is not legal advice.

Who Has to Notify

The duty sits on the Responsible Person, not on the maker as such — though for a home maker selling her own products those are usually the same person. The operative provision:

"Before placing a cosmetic product on the market, the responsible person must submit by electronic means the following information to the Secretary of State"

GOV.UK puts the same duty in plainer terms:

"If you are making cosmetic products available to consumers in Great Britain (GB: England, Scotland, and Wales), you must notify your cosmetic products"

The Responsible Person can be the manufacturer, the importer, the distributor if they label the product as their own, or an appointed person authorised by the manufacturer or importer. If you make soap in your kitchen and sell it under your own brand, that is you.

There is no exemption written into the requirement for small volumes, hobby selling, or a first batch of six bars. The duty attaches to placing the product on the market.

What Counts as a Cosmetic Here

Anything applied to the external body for cleaning, perfuming, changing appearance, protecting, or keeping in good condition. For a craft maker, that is the soap, bath bombs, balms, butters, lotions, scrubs, shampoo bars and lip products.

It is not your candles, wax melts, reed diffusers or room sprays. Those are chemical mixtures under GB CLP, which has no notification service of this kind — a different regime with different obligations. If you make both, you are running two tracks, and only the cosmetic one goes through SCPN. Our guide to CLP versus cosmetics sets out which of your products falls where.

What SCPN Asks For

The statutory list and the service's own list line up. You will need:

• The product category and the name it is sold under
• The name of the Responsible Person
• The address where the Product Information File is kept
• Contact details for urgent enquiries
• Details of any nanomaterials
• Details of any substances classified as carcinogenic, mutagenic or toxic for reproduction (category 1A or 1B)
• The frame formulation, so a doctor treating a poisoning case can be told what is in the product
• The original labelling, and a photograph of the packaging where it is reasonably legible

The frame formulation is the part makers find unfamiliar. Article 13 ties it to medical treatment: it is the information a doctor treating a poisoning case would need, supplied in categorised form rather than as your working recipe.

Almost all of that comes out of documents you already have if the earlier steps are done. The safety report gives you the formulation detail; the Responsible Person details are your own; the PIF address is wherever you keep the file.

Where It Sits in the Order

This is the part worth getting right, because doing it out of sequence creates rework rather than saving time.

1. Finalise the formulation. Exact percentages, not "roughly this."
2. Commission the safety assessment. Its operative gate: "Before making a cosmetic product available to consumers, its safety must be checked by a qualified safety assessor."
3. Establish the Responsible Person. A cosmetic product may not be placed on the market unless there is a Responsible Person established in the UK for it.
4. Assemble the Product Information File.
5. Notify through SCPN.
6. Sell.

SCPN is fifth, not first. Makers who try to notify early find the form asking for a frame formulation and a PIF address they do not yet have.

One Notification Per Product

Notification is per product, not per business and not per range. Six scents of one base recipe may be six notifications or fewer depending on how the formulations actually differ — the deciding factor is the formulation and the frame formulation it maps to, not the label design or the scent name.

This matters for planning. A maker launching a six-scent range is doing six lots of preparation, which is also why assessors commonly quote more favourably for a range built on a shared base than for six unrelated products.

If You Reformulate

A notified product is notified as it was described. Change the formulation and the notification no longer describes what you are selling — the same problem the safety assessment has. Substituting a fragrance oil, changing a preservative, or shifting percentages enough to alter the frame formulation all point back at both steps.

This is the practical argument for keeping formulation records in a form you can actually diff, rather than in a folder of dated spreadsheets. When you cannot tell precisely what changed, you cannot tell whether the change reached the notification.

What It Costs

The GOV.UK guidance for the service does not publish a notification fee. What is reliably expensive in this process is the safety assessment, priced per formulation, and your own time assembling documentation — so budget for those rather than for the notification step.

Common Questions

Is SCPN the same as a licence?

No. There is no licence for selling cosmetics in the UK. SCPN is a notification — you file the information, and no permission is issued in return. Nothing about a completed notification confirms your product is compliant.

Do I notify before or after the safety assessment?

After. The notification asks for a frame formulation and a Product Information File address, both of which come out of the assessment stage.

Does SCPN cover Northern Ireland?

No. SCPN is the Great Britain service, and GOV.UK says so in terms: "There is a separate process for placing cosmetic products on the market in Northern Ireland." The GB guidance is equally explicit about its own limits — it "does not cover making cosmetic products available in Northern Ireland (NI), for which the Responsible Person must be established in NI or the EU". Northern Ireland follows EU cosmetics rules, so both the notification route and the establishment requirement differ. If you ship to NI, check the NI position separately rather than assuming the GB answer carries.

Do my candles need an SCPN notification?

No. Candles, wax melts and diffusers are not cosmetics. They sit under GB CLP, which works differently — see our complete guide to CLP labels.

What if I already notified through the EU portal?

Products notified through the EU's CPNP before 1 January 2021 fell under a transitional arrangement with its own deadline, which has long passed. A product being placed on the GB market now needs a GB notification.

Related Guides

• Laws on selling homemade beauty products UK
• Selling cosmetics from home in the UK: legal requirements and compliance
• Soap and cosmetics safety assessments: what UK makers need to know
• Cosmetic labelling requirements UK: a plain-English guide

CraftCert covers the CLP side of a maker's range — candles, wax melts, diffusers and room sprays — keeping formulations, allergen percentages and batch records organised so labels come out of the recipe. It does not submit SCPN notifications or produce a CPSR; those stay with you and your assessor. Our scope page sets out exactly where the line sits.

Sources

• legislation.gov.uk — Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, Article 13 (Notification)
• legislation.gov.uk — Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, Article 4 (Responsible person)
• GOV.UK — Submit a cosmetic product notification
• GOV.UK — Making cosmetic products available to consumers in Great Britain