Expensive to get wrongUnited KingdomBeauty & personal care

Great Britain kept the EU cosmetics rulebook

The prohibition on placing animal-tested cosmetic products on the market that appears at Article 18 of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 continues to have effect in Great Britain as retained legislation published by The National Archives, so the substantive rule is the same text on both sides of the border while the filings that satisfy it are separate.

The temptation after Brexit is to treat Great Britain as either a member state or a foreign market, and on this rule it is neither, which means one formulation dossier can serve both and one notification cannot.

Limits how to read Animal testing is a market ban, not a label

78 of a possible 97Tier A, primary document or measured outcome. Nothing at this tier is allowed past 97, however good it looks.

Verified August 5, 2026Rechecked every 365 days, next by August 5, 2027.

Constraint

Held since January 1, 2021A rule, law or policy that limits what you may do or say. The earliest date we are willing to say this held. It may well have been true before that; we do not backdate a record past the evidence we have read. Supported, version 1.

This entry is wrong if

Great Britain revokes or amends the retained Article 18, or legislation.gov.uk marks the provision as no longer in force.

Written before the record was published, not after. If you can show this, send it to hello@tryorbt.com and the correction goes on the record with the entry.

Evidence

Tier Aregulation
The National Archives (legislation.gov.uk): Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products, Article 18 (Animal testing), as retained in Great Britain
Article 18 Animal testing. Without prejudice to the general obligations deriving from Article 3, the following shall be prohibited: the placing on the market of cosmetic products where the final formulation, in order to meet the requirements of this Regulation, has been the subject of animal testing using a method other than an alternative method.
Published by The National Archives under the retained EU legislation series. The confidence is held down because we have read the article, not the full amendment history attached to it.
Read 2026-08-05 · Open government · page hash 1cf07053cfeb

History

v2correctedAugust 9, 2026
Corrected. The claim asserted that the animal-testing prohibition is the same text in Great Britain as in the EU, and that its tier A evidence was the retained GB provision. Both were wrong. Article 18 of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 was substituted in full for Great Britain on 31 December 2020 by The Product Safety and Metrology etc. (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 (S.I. 2019/696), Sch. 34 para. 17, and the quote we published was the original 2009 EU wording, which the cited URL has not served since. The prohibition on placing animal-tested cosmetics on the market does survive in Great Britain, so the claim is corrected rather than retired: the statement now records that the rule carried over while the wording did not, the quote is taken from the provision as served on 2026-08-09, and the falsifier is rewritten because the previous one ("Great Britain revokes or amends the retained Article 18") had already been satisfied before the claim was first written. Found by scripts/verify.mjs, which checks published quotes against the live documents they cite.
What it said before
The prohibition on placing animal-tested cosmetic products on the market that appears at Article 18 of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 continues to have effect in Great Britain as retained legislation published by The National Archives, so the substantive rule is the same text on both sides of the border while the filings that satisfy it are separate.
v1createdAugust 5, 2026
Initial entry from primary regulator text outside the United States, read 2026-08-05.

Append-only. Nothing in this list is edited or removed once written, including the entries that record our own mistakes. Every change to every record is on the corrections page, and the same log is in entries.json under revisions.

uk
brexit
animal-testing
market-entry
compliance
beauty

Cite this entry

“Great Britain kept the EU cosmetics rulebook”, The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0, entry omr:gb:the-animal-testing-ban-survived-brexit, retrieved September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/gb--the-animal-testing-ban-survived-brexit. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22679129

Orbt, "Great Britain kept the EU cosmetics rulebook," Orbt Market Index, entry omr:gb:the-animal-testing-ban-survived-brexit, verified August 5, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/gb--the-animal-testing-ban-survived-brexit.

@misc{orbt-gb-the-animal-testing-ban-survived-brexit,
  title        = {Great Britain kept the EU cosmetics rulebook},
  author       = {{Orbt}},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.22679129},
  note         = {The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0 (dataset DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22679129), entry omr:gb:the-animal-testing-ban-survived-brexit. Verified 2026-08-05},
  howpublished = {\url{https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/gb--the-animal-testing-ban-survived-brexit}},
  license      = {Orbt Index Public Licence. Free to quote and cite; not to redistribute}
}

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