Fragrance allergens in your cosmetics: what happens now that 31 July 2026 has passed

Keywords: fragrance allergen deadline 2026 · Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 · placing on the market cosmetics · making available on the market EU · fragrance allergen transitional period

Most indie beauty brands spent June and July treating 31 July 2026 like a hard stop: relabel everything, or pull it from sale. Now that the date has passed, the question we're getting is the opposite one — “does everything on my shelf now need to come off, or be relabelled overnight?”

The answer is no. But understanding why requires a distinction that most compliance checklists skip, and that will matter again the next time the EU amends Annex III, Annex II, or any other annex of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009. Understanding it once means you won't have to relearn it from scratch at the next deadline.

Two dates, not one

Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 draws a clear line between two concepts that get used interchangeably in everyday conversation but mean very different things in the text of the law.

“Placing on the market” means the first time a product is supplied on the EU market — in practice, the moment the Responsible Person or importer first makes it available to a distributor, retailer, or another operator within the EU. It happens once per batch.

“Making available on the market” means every supply after that — distributor to retailer, retailer to consumer, warehouse to shop floor. It can happen many times for the same batch, over months or years.

Compliance deadlines in EU cosmetics law are almost always anchored to the first of these two dates, not the second. Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 — which expanded the list of fragrance allergens requiring individual labelling from 26 to 81 substances, at thresholds of 0.001% in leave-on products and 0.01% in rinse-off products — is no exception.

What the transitional period actually says

The rule is straightforward once the two dates are separated:

• A batch first placed on the EU market before 31 July 2026, under the old (pre-2023/1545) labelling rules, can continue to be made available — sold, distributed, displayed — until 31 July 2028, even though its label doesn't reflect the expanded allergen list.

  
  

• A batch placed on the EU market for the first time on or after 31 July 2026 must already comply in full: the complete 81-substance list, correct thresholds, updated ingredient declaration. There is no grace period for new placements.

In practice, this means two bottles of the exact same formula, sitting side by side on a shelf today, can legitimately carry different labels — one compliant with the old rules, one with the new — depending on which batch was placed on the EU market first, and when.

Where indie brands get this wrong

Three mistakes come up constantly in the weeks after a deadline like this one:

Treating the deadline as a relabelling mandate for existing stock. It isn't. Nothing in Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 requires brands to recall or relabel product that was already placed on the market before the cutover.

Using the retail sale date, or the date a product arrives on a shop shelf, as the reference point. Neither is the legally relevant date — the Responsible Person's first placing on the EU market is, and that date is usually earlier and less visible than either of those.

Treating a SKU as a single unit rather than a series of batches. Compliance status attaches to the batch, based on when that specific batch was placed on the market — not to the product line as a whole.

The practical consequence is that documentation now matters more than relabelling speed. If a market surveillance authority questions why a bottle without the full allergen declaration is still for sale in September 2026, the answer isn't “we're working on it” — it's the invoice or delivery note showing exactly when that batch was first placed on the EU market, ideally before 31 July 2026.

A pattern you'll see again

This isn't a one-off feature of the fragrance allergen amendment. The placing/making-available split is the standard transitional mechanism the European Commission uses whenever it amends Annex II or Annex III of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 — whether the change is a new restricted allergen, a new banned CMR substance, or a new concentration limit.

It's already built into the next wave of change. On 8 July 2026, the Commission notified the WTO of a draft regulation — informally referred to as Omnibus IX — combining new CMR-based prohibitions with restrictions drawn from recent SCCS opinions. The provisions tied to CMR classification are expected to apply from 1 February 2027, with the remaining bans and restrictions following a transitional structure of 12 and 24 months for placing and making available, respectively, once the regulation enters into force.

In other words: the same two-date logic that governs your shelf today will govern it again in 2027. Brands that understand the mechanism now don't need to relearn it for every future amendment — they just need to plug in the new dates.

Checklist: are you actually compliant right now

• Identify the date each current batch was first placed on the EU market — the invoice or delivery date to the first EU distributor or importer, not the manufacture date and not the retail sale date.

  
  

• For batches placed before 31 July 2026: confirm the label matched the rules in force at that time. No relabelling is required, but keep the documentation that proves the placing date.

  
  

• For any batch placed on or after 31 July 2026: confirm the label reflects the full 81-substance list at the correct thresholds, and that the Product Information File has been updated accordingly.

  
  

• If a batch's placing date can't be established with documentary evidence, treat it as non-compliant and address it — the burden of proof sits with the Responsible Person, not with the authority raising the question.

  
  

• Build the habit now: log the placing-on-market date for every batch going forward, so the next Annex III or Annex II amendment doesn't require reconstructing this evidence retroactively.

At Cláritas Regulatory, we help indie brands build exactly this kind of audit trail — one that holds up not just for this deadline, but for the next one, and the one after that. If you'd like a second look at your fragrance allergen documentation, or want to get ahead of what Omnibus IX will require, get in touch.