Mercury Exceeds the Limit by 40,000 Times!
- Chaileedo Press
- Sep 20, 2022
- 3 min read
Consumers bought whitening and spot-removing cosmetics with excessive mercury content, which led to large-scale production and sales of cosmetics with a serious mercury content exceeding the standard, involving an amount of more than ten million yuan.
Recently, according to CCTV news and other media reports, a consumer in Jiangsu Province said that the "MEWSQUEEN" brand cosmetics purchased from a cosmetic store for 2400 yuan ($342.54) claimed can brighten skin and spot-removing, but after using the product, serious skin allergy symptoms occurred and the mercury content of the product was found to be seriously over the limit.
The same cosmetics purchased from the MEWSQUEEN cosmetics store by law enforcement officers pretending to be consumers were found to have serious excess mercury content that exceeded the standard by a factor of 5,700. The labels of the two non-sale products only indicated the product name, whitening and brightening efficacy, and did not indicate the basic information such as manufacturer, batch number, and ingredients. In addition, it was also impossible to check the registration and file information of the two products.
Law enforcement officials said that the brand's main sales model is to sell legal products but the effect is not obvious while selling non-selling products that are supposedly effective but have excessive mercury content.
After extensive visits and investigations, law enforcement discovered the production and processing places of these cosmetics in Guangdong where the mercury levels were severely exceeded and seized a large number of cosmetics on the spot. It randomly sampled some of the raw materials and batches of cosmetics for testing, and the results showed that the highest mercury content was in the MEWSQUEEN Night Consolidation Cream which was the subject of the complaint, with one batch containing more than 40,000 times more mercury than the limit set by national standards.
The investigated production site produced a total of 9,059 sets of cosmetics with excessive mercury content, and adopted the model of Wechat business agencies to sell them nationwide, purchasing the products for 48 yuan ($6.85) to 58 yuan ($8.28) per set, with the agents increasing the price through layers and layers, with the terminal selling price ranging from 500 yuan ($71.35) to 800 yuan ($114.15). In other words, the price of a set of products has increased approximately 10 times.
Ultimately, the law enforcement authorities in the case investigated and destroyed 3 production spots and 1 sales spot of substandard cosmetics, seizing more than 10,000 pieces of substandard cosmetics and involving a total amount of more than 10 million yuan ($1,426,900).
Before the implementation of the Cosmetic Supervision and Administration Regulation, the State Medical Products Administration reviewed whitening special certificate products based on whether microorganisms exceeded the standard, whether heavy metal content exceeded the standard, and whether they contained prohibited ingredients. After the new regulations, spot-removing and whitening cosmetics also added the requirement of the human efficacy evaluation test.
In China, whitening has long been the second largest demand market after moisturizing. It is known that cosmetics with added mercury can achieve the effect of whitening in the short term. Therefore, some unscrupulous businesses aim at consumers' eagerness for beauty and add mercury and other heavy metal substances illegally to whitening and spot-removing cosmetics.
When cosmetics with excessive mercury content are active in the market under the banner of "fast whitening", they not only seriously endanger consumers' health, but also affect cosmetic companies that operate in compliance. Therefore, removing the black sheep in the industry is fundamentally beneficial to the healthy and standardized growth of the industry.
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