Summary and conclusions

A guidance document on microbiological control of cosmetic products

A guidance document on microbiological control of cosmetic products was created within a project from Virksomhedsordningen of the DEPA. The intention of the guidance document is to introduce adequate methods of testing and knowledge of the general demands on microbiological testing laboratories. The guidance document recommends the use of the newly published ISO standards especially produced for microbiological control of cosmetic products, before, during and at end of use. As no ISO standard for challenge testing is yet available a challenge test based on earlier described methods is presented in this guidance document as a suggestion to how a challenge test can be constructed. Unfortunately the proposed challenge test has not been validated or tested in laboratories and therefore we do not have the knowledge of how it performs in different laboratories.