How to Notify a Cosmetic on the UK SCPN After Brexit

If you filed on CPNP years ago and assumed that covered you everywhere in Europe including the UK, it's worth double checking that assumption today. Great Britain split off from the EU notification system, and the two portals do not talk to each other. A product notified in Paris is not automatically known to London. That's the single most common gap that trips up sellers who built their compliance process before the split and never revisited it.

Why the old CPNP entry stopped counting

Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 still governs the EU, and the CPNP portal is still how you notify a product there, with a Responsible Person established in the EU holding the Product Information File and Cosmetic Product Safety Report. Great Britain, however, runs its own separate system through the Office for Product Safety and Standards, using the Submit Cosmetic Product Notifications service, usually shortened to SCPN. A UK notification is a distinct legal step from an EU one. If you sell into both markets, you generally need both, and you need a Responsible Person for each side, which for many small brands means one for the EU and a separate one based in the UK (or Northern Ireland arrangements, which have their own nuances worth confirming directly with OPSS).

What SCPN actually asks for

Walking through it at a high level, you'll be providing information that should look familiar if you've done any cosmetic notification before, though the specific fields and portal mechanics are UK-specific:

• Product identity and category
• The formulation, generally by INCI name with concentration information
• Details of the UK Responsible Person
• Product Information File equivalent documentation, kept on file and produced on request rather than uploaded in full
• Any relevant safety assessment supporting the formulation

The general shape mirrors CPNP because the UK inherited the EU cosmetics framework at the point of departure, but it has since become its own system with its own updates, so don't assume every future EU rule change automatically shows up on the UK side, or vice versa.

A practical walkthrough order

1. Confirm you need a UK Responsible Person first. Nothing else proceeds without this. It can be you, if you're UK based, or a UK-established third party if you're not.
2. Assemble your formulation data cleanly. Every ingredient by INCI name, with real concentrations, not trade names. If you're using supplier blends, expand them to the actual component percentages, since a filing needs to reflect what's really in the finished product, not the marketing name of a blend.
3. Have your safety assessment ready or commissioned. SCPN notification does not replace the underlying safety substantiation, it's just the notification step.
4. Submit through the SCPN portal itself, entering the product and formulation details as prompted.
5. Keep your supporting file (the PIF-equivalent documentation) organized and retrievable, since notification doesn't mean you never have to produce the backing safety data.
6. Update the UK notification separately whenever the formula changes, the same way you would for an EU or Health Canada filing, since each market's record needs to reflect the actual current product.

The mistake worth flagging twice

Sellers sometimes treat "I'm notified in the EU" as a superset that includes the UK, because before Brexit that was functionally true. It no longer is. If your business ships product into both London and Berlin, you're maintaining two separate notification trails, two Responsible Persons, and potentially two slightly different sets of supporting documentation, even though the underlying formula is identical. It's extra administrative overhead, but it's not optional, and getting caught without a UK notification while actively selling into Great Britain is the kind of gap that surfaces at the worst time, usually during an inspection or a retailer's compliance check.

Because portal names, exact field requirements, and any Northern Ireland-specific carve-outs can shift, it's worth checking OPSS's current published guidance before you submit, rather than relying on a walkthrough written at a single point in time.

Cosmetic Comply currently handles the Canadian side of this problem end to end, mapping ingredients to INCI and CAS, screening against the Hotlist, and filing the CNF for a trackable number. The UK, EU, and other markets are being built out next, which matters here specifically because so many small brands discover the EU-UK split the hard way, after they've already shipped product across the Channel.