China's National Institutes for Food and Drug Control (NIFDC) has published an errata notice correcting the Safety and Technical Standards for Cosmetics, the foundational technical document that governs cosmetic safety evaluation and testing across the Chinese market.

The standards, officially titled the Safety and Technical Standards for Cosmetics (2015 edition), serve as the primary technical reference for every registered or notified cosmetic product sold in China. Any correction to the text matters directly to formulators, responsible persons and testing laboratories working with the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) framework.

What are the errata about?

Errata of this kind correct errors identified in the published text of the standards — for instance, misprints in test methods, incorrect references, or discrepancies between clauses. NIFDC, which operates under the China Center for Drug Evaluation and falls under the NMPA system, is the body responsible for developing and maintaining the technical standards that laboratories use when generating the safety assessment data required for product registration and notification dossiers.

Because the standards define the analytical methods, limit values and testing protocols that regulators accept, even small textual corrections can have practical consequences. A lab running a purity or impurity test against a misprinted parameter, or a formulator checking a restricted-substance limit against an erroneous figure, needs the corrected text to keep dossiers consistent with what reviewers expect.

What does this mean for compliance teams?

For companies with products on the Chinese market, or those preparing filings, the immediate task is straightforward: verify which passages of the Safety and Technical Standards have been corrected and check whether any current dossiers, safety assessments or in-house specifications reference the affected text.

The practical checkpoints include:

• Confirming that third-party testing laboratories contracted for Chinese filings have updated their method documentation in line with the corrected text.
• Reviewing product specification sheets and safety assessment reports that cite the standards.
• Checking whether any restricted-ingredient limits or test parameters cited in existing registration dossiers match the corrected version.

China's regulatory regime for cosmetics, rebuilt around the Cosmetics Supervision and Administration Regulation (CSAR) that took effect in 2021, continues to rely on the 2015 technical standards as the operative testing benchmark while the authorities progressively update and supplement them. Errata notices are part of that maintenance process.

Why the document matters so widely

The Safety and Technical Standards for Cosmetics sets the general requirements for safety evaluation, lists prohibited and restricted substances, and defines the standard analytical methods for testing cosmetic raw materials and finished products. Products imported into China, whether through the registration route for special cosmetics or the notification route for general cosmetics, must ultimately demonstrate conformity with the requirements it contains.

That makes the errata relevant not only to Chinese domestic manufacturers but to every overseas brand exporting to China, and to the consultancies and contract laboratories that prepare their technical documentation.

What comes next

Companies should treat the errata as a housekeeping deadline rather than a regulatory shock: align internal documentation now, before the next filing cycle. The signal to watch going forward is whether NIFDC follows the corrections with a fuller revision of the 2015 standards, a step the industry has anticipated as part of the post-CSAR modernisation of China's technical requirements.