Year: 2017

cosmetics business virtual assistant

If you’re interested in expanding your team affordably and efficiently, hiring virtual assistants (VAs) can be the perfect solution to your staffing problems. We’ve put together the following Top 10 tips for working with VAs, which will help ensure a productive and rewarding experience for you, your team and the VAs that you hire:

  1. Get to know your VA!
    Spend time getting to know your new VA and building a good rapport with them. Find out what specialist skills and experience they may have and what tasks and roles they may be competent in taking on for you and your business.
  2. Have a clear plan for the work your VA will undertake
    Don’t expect your VA to magically understand what support you need!  Discuss the tasks and activities that you require support with and ensure the VA has everything they require to work effectively on these.
  3. Communication is key
    Schedule regular online meetings and communicate clearly.  How often do you need to check in with each other by email?  Who will be the main contact person in your company for your VA and how and when can they be reached
  4. Respect your VAs own schedule and plan accordingly
    Your VA will normally work an 8-hour day during office hours in their own time zone, so it’s important that they always have work to do during the times that your working hours do not overlap. To ensure continuity, it’s a good idea to have an agreed ‘backlog’ of tasks that the VA can perform if they are awaiting further instructions from you.
  5. Support your VA in understanding your business and requirements
    Every business is unique. Invest some time to introduce your new VA to your business. What is unique about what you offer and how you operate? Who are your team members and how will the VA work with them? What are your aspirations, goals and vision for the business? Welcome your VA into your team and let them know the importance of the work they will perform for your company.
  6. Provide adequate supervision and reviews
    Every staff member, whether working remotely or in the office, performs best when they experience job satisfaction, are treated in a friendly and fair way and are offered the potential to grow and learn new skills. As your VA becomes more familiar with your business, set up clear reviews, such as every three months. Discuss with them where they could take on new responsibilities or be trained in new skills. Listen to any problems they face in working for you and look for ways to improve, where possible.
  7. Be clear about expectations and working practices
    Consider providing your VA with a version of any staff manual for your business and request as one of their first tasks, that they familiarize themselves with this. Ask them to agree to and sign an agreement and include any key information, such as termination clause, vacations, handling of secure information and any unacceptable practices. Communicate closely with your VA to establish a clear framework of understanding, to avoid problems later.
  8. Be realistic about your commitment to supporting your VAs
    Hiring a VA will achieve considerable savings and improve efficiency in your business. Before you hire a VA, we recommend thinking carefully about not only the ongoing financial commitment, but also how you will provide continuous work and effectively manage your VA. You will need to train your VA at the beginning and keep in regular contact with them, to check the quality of their work and monitor their progress.
  9. Use the Product Manager task manager
    We recommend using Product Manager’s tasks to conduct task-related communication. Make it part of your daily routine to check your Product Manager dashboard for new task updates, note and reminders. Avoid long email conversations which refer to multiple tasks and activities. Stay on topic, using short instructions and comments related to single, actionable tasks.
  10. Share your data and documents securely via Cosmetri
    For product and compliance-related documents, we recommend using Product Manager and/or Cosmetri GMP to securely exchange these and to ensure that they are correctly tagged and digitally archived. For other documents, use a cloud-based service such as Google Drive or Dropbox to enable you, your team and the VA to share important files. To share confidential data such as passwords, we recommend a cloud-based password manager. Insist that your VA never stores such data on their local computer and that they keep any device they use secure and protected.
PIF software EU compliance

PIF software from cosmetri, enables fast generation and therefore easy maintenance of your product information file, also known as the PIF. This is a requirement of Cosmetic Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 and thus applies to any cosmetic or personal product sold within the EU.

PIF software allows for user-friendly, efficient updating to ensure that the PIF is current. In Product Manager, Cosmetri’s unique Compliance Checker alerts you to any missing compliance data or documents required for the PIF. A task is automatically generated for each required action and a score shows how complete your product data is.

PIF software - compliance checker

Product Manager generates a PIF report in PDF format, including your own company’s logo and contact details. Your compliance documents are exported within the same folder and referenced within the report. Click on a link in the PIF report while logged in, thus viewing any document online, or alternatively open the corresponding file within the folder. The PIF software therefore provides full portability of your product data and documents along with the flexibility of accessing your data and documents in the cloud.

PIF software example report, pages 1-2, from 8:

PIF software report

In addition, batch trace-ability is provided by Product Manager, ensuring that the PIF includes all raw material batch data and documents. The PIF is automatically updated to include your product batch data, through integration with the manufacturing module. PIF software has therefore never been easier to use – why not trial Product Manager for free and find out for yourself?

perfume allergens

Perfume allergens, also known as ‘fragrance allergens’ or ‘sensitizers’, can cause problems for formulators and those responsible for compliance of cosmetics and personal care products. We’ve produced this article to provide some recommended best practices and to explain how to best set up perfumes/fragrances, essential oils and apply these correctly to your formulations.

Some countries do not require the declaration of specific perfume allergens. For example, the U.S. regulations require that fragrance ingredients are listed simply as “Fragrance”. The Food and Drugs Administration, states: “FDA does not have the same legal authority to require allergen labeling for cosmetics as for food.” 1

Even though your local regulations may not stipulate special requirements for perfume allergens, we recommend declaring these in the raw materials used in your formulations, in accordance with Article 19 (g) of Regulation (EC) N° 1223/2009. 2 It’s easy to then omit them from your label of ingredients if not required and ensures that your raw materials are set up by default for the EU market. This also provides flexibility in the future, should you wish to expand to other markets where perfume allergens must be declared.

According to the EU regulations, perfume allergens must be declared on the label of ingredients when they are present in concentrations exceeding 0.001 percent in leave-on products such as creams and lotions, and 0.01 percent in rinse-off products such as shampoos and soaps. There are currently 26 of these perfume allergens, which are listed in Annex III of CosIng.3

Download guide as PDF
Download the Product Manager User Guide (PDF), with useful tips on managing perfume allergens in cosmetics formulations.

Use of the term ‘parfum’ or ‘fragrance’

Ingredients used in strictly necessary quantities as solvents, or as carriers, for perfume and aromatic compositions may be declared as the INCI ‘Parfum’ – providing protection of the intellectual property of perfume houses who wish not to disclose their exact formulations. Depending on your country, this ‘Parfum’ may alternatively be displayed as e.g. ‘Fragrance’ or ‘Aroma’ on your label of ingredients. Essential oils however should be entered with the oil’s main ingredient and any perfume allergens declared additional to this. Usually the main ingredient (the oil itself) would be entered at 100 %w/w.

In cosmetri it does not matter that the total max. %w/w for the ingredients in the essential oil are > 100. It would be logically incorrect to say for example, that an allergen exists at 10% concentration in the oil and therefore the oil should be entered at 90%. If you sourced an oil that had no such allergen present, you would still use the oil @100%, rather than substituting the allergen for another ingredient. In other words, the perfume allergen is a property of the oil and is not separate to it, even though it must be ‘added’ as such to the raw material’s composition for the purpose of correctly calculating perfume allergen concentrations in the product’s formula.

Calculating perfume allergens in your cosmetic product

To calculate the percentage of each perfume allergen in your product, let’s take the following example of Myrtle Essential Oil, with some typical allergen concentrations in the product, based on adding this @0.5 %w/w and 0.1 %w/w:

  Coumarin Eugenol Geraniol Citronellol Limonene Linalool
             
Myrtle Oil 0.20000% 0.70000% 0.80000% 0.30000% 12.00000% 2.00000%
             
0.5 %w/w in product 0.00100% 0.00350% 0.00400% 0.00150% 0.06000% 0.01000%
RINSE-OFF 0.01% OK OK OK  OK DECLARE BORDERLINE
LEAVE-ON 0.001% BORDERLINE DECLARE DECLARE DECLARE DECLARE DECLARE
             
0.1 %w/w in product 0.00020% 0.00070% 0.00080% 0.00030% 0.01200% 0.00200%
RINSE-OFF 0.01% OK OK OK OK DECLARE OK
LEAVE-ON 0.001% OK OK OK OK DECLARE DECLARE

Regulation (EC) N° 1223/2009 and similar regulations in other countries stipulate that the concentration of Coumarin @0.01000% in the 0.5 %w/w version ‘rinse-off’ example, would not require inclusion on the label because this concentration ‘does not exceed 0.01000%’, whereas the other five perfume allergens must be declared, with Linalool @0.01000% shown in the above table as ‘Borderline’. In this case, we recommend that you consult with your safety assessor and/or check your local regulation for whether in such a case the allergen must be declared on the product’s label. In cosmetri’s Product Manager, in the formula’s ‘Labels’ tab any allergen concentrations must exceed the threshold in order to be shown on the label.

The calculations of course become more of a headache when we must consider each instance of a perfume allergen that appears in your product formula – for example if more than one essential oil is used. Then we have also to consider the case of an ingredient such as Benzyl Alcohol, that may be used for a non-perfuming function e.g. as a preservative, but must still be included in any calculation of perfume allergens. In CosIng this can be confusing because this example ingredient exists as three different records in the database. Using cosmetri you can enter any of these three versions and each will be also classified as a perfume allergen so that the correct total allergen concentration for e.g. Benzyl Alcohol can be determined.

Variations in concentration of perfume allergens between batches

If you’ve followed the logic so far, we have one more aspect to potentially complicate matters. Let’s take the example of Coumarin in our Myrtle essential oil, used @0.5 %w/w in a leave-on product. Perfume allergen concentrations in essential oils tend to vary from batch to batch, so it’s important to check the documentation provided with the batch received from your supplier. You may have had your product labels printed and omitted Coumarin from the label of ingredients. But a small increase in Coumarin in a later batch of the essential oil would put this perfume allergen over the threshold, requiring it to be included on the label. Few companies have checks in place for such a case and can unwittingly fall foul of the regulations.

Using Cosmetri’s Product Manager, you can calculate the expected perfume allergen concentrations when first designing your formula and easily check the concentrations for each batch of your product that you manufacture – even in the case that you manufacture using more than one batch of an essential oil, with different perfume allergen concentrations present in each batch.

Borderline perfume allergens

If you are not using software capable of such calculations, we recommend identifying any ‘borderline’ allergens in your formula that risk exceeding the threshold required for declaration on your label of ingredients. This requires establishing the average percentage fluctuation of the allergen’s concentration form batch to batch of your raw material (such as a perfume or essential oil) and then adding a further ‘safety margin’ on top of this. For example, if your average level of Coumarin in your batches of Myrtle Oil is 0.20000%, but the maximum was 0.25000% it’s good practice to add a further say, 25% safety margin, so that the maximum assumed level will be 0.31250%. In the example calculation earlier, this would require declaring Coumarin in your product label, whereas previously it was not required.

While you may wish to declare as few perfume allergens as possible on your label, it may be better to be on the safe side and thus avoid having to re-calculate the label of ingredients from batch to batch of your product.

Download the Product Manager User Guide (PDF), with useful tips on managing perfume allergens in cosmetics formulations.

 

Sources:

  1. https://www.fda.gov/cosmetics/productsingredients/ingredients/ucm388821.htm#labeling
  2. http://ec.europa.eu/health//sites/health/files/endocrine_disruptors/docs/cosmetic_1223_2009_regulation_en.pdf
  3. http://ec.europa.eu/growth/tools-databases/cosing/index.cfm?fuseaction=search.results&annex_v2=III&search