Safety, Quality, Effectiveness
The work of the Safety, Quality and Effectiveness department, strategically positioned in the R&D Center, concerns both cosmetic raw materials (active ingredients and excipients) and finished products. It ensures that the products marketed comply with Laboratoires Expanscience’s requirements and with regulatory constraints.
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Safety: an absolute requirement
Since most Laboratoires Expanscience products are intended for use by sensitive populations (pregnant women, children, people with delicate skin), they are subject to particularly rigorous safety requirements.
During the development process, every product therefore undergoes a battery of tests designed to prove its innocuousness and good tolerance: cutaneous and ocular tolerance tests, tests for hypoallergenicity and phototoxicity (reaction to exposure to sunlight), etc. Depending on the circumstances, these tests are performed in vitro (on validated cellular models) or on healthy adult volunteers.
During their development, the products go through several further checks, mainly in order to verify their stability over time in both physicochemical and microbiological terms.
After product marketing, the cosmetics monitoring department carries out detailed surveillance of all possible undesirable effects: if a problem is reported, it is immediately recorded then analyzed in order to identify its cause and take preventive or corrective measures if applicable.
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Quality subject to detailed surveillance
The quality of Expanscience products is carefully evaluated during the development process:
• To be accepted for use in the stock of raw materials used by Expanscience, every new substance must comply with strict specifications concerning its source, production conditions, the process of obtaining it, its traceability, stability, and physicochemical and toxicological characteristics, together with its compliance with the sustainable development criteria defined by the company. A committee of internal and external expert scientists, made up of chemists, biologists, analysts and toxicology pharmacists is responsible for selecting the raw materials that meet these requirements.
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• For each product and each material, a control monograph is developed, with specifications as to its identity, titer and purity. Systematic quality controls, developed in accordance with validated analysis methods, are then performed on each batch at the different stages of production, through to the finished product.
• Constant traceability is ensured during production: if a problem were to arise on a product, even after several years, the entire production chain could be retrieved in order to define the precise source of the incident.
• Finally, product quality is guaranteed by a set of rules based firstly on the principle of best production or laboratory practices, complied with by the entire company, and secondly on compliance with the quality specifications, regulatory requirements and guidelines applicable.
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Proven effectiveness
Laboratoires Expanscience evaluates the effectiveness of its products with the same precision as their safety and quality. Once the innocuousness of a care product has been established, three types of effectiveness test may be performed:
• Self-assessment tests: generally performed under medical supervision, these tests enable volunteers themselves to assess product effectiveness with the help of a questionnaire after everyday use. This is known as perceived effectiveness.
• Biometrological tests: these are designed to measure product effectiveness in the laboratory using laboratory equipment, based on criteria such as moisturizing. This is known as measured effectiveness.
• Clinical tests: these use a clinician’s expertise to assess an effect, such as a reduction in the intensity of pigmentation marks. This is known as visible effectiveness.
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