The E.U. is Coming for Your Beauty Products

The European Union (EU) loves nothing so well as overregulation, and, whenever possible, exporting their overregulation worldwide. Continental regulators squeeze their domestic markets much too hard, killing innovation and economic dynamism. Then, to raise the competitiveness their sinking industries, drowning in regulatory burdens, they often seek to drag other nations’ firms beneath the waterline. This phenomena has now made its way to silicones.

The EU has enacted byzantine and economically obtuse tech regulations that serve disproportionately to burden U.S. tech giants. These American firms have, in the relative freedom of U.S. tech markets, thoroughly drubbed their European competition. Likewise, the EU reportedly scuttled a proposed resolution to its recent scrutiny of Microsoft Teams on the grounds that the company planned to alter its practices only in Europe – not globally. Or take the EU’s recently approved carbon border adjustment mechanism, which will foist on importers the continent’s domestic emissions-based regulatory costs.

Now, citing alleged (yet vigorously disputed) health concerns, the EU is now weighing new restrictions on the use of silicone, which appears in myriad products (including personal-care products, cleaning agents, solar panels, car parts, and much else). Since 2021, the EU has restricted the use of variations of silicone (known as D4 and D5) in “wash-off cosmetic products.”

The proposed measure would restrict further the use of D4 and D5 and would, moreover, regulate another variation, D6.

It would:

“…restrict[] the placing on the market of D6 in wash-off cosmetic products as well as further restricting the placing on the market of D4, D5, D6 in leave-on cosmetic products. Moreover, this draft regulation aims to restrict the placing on the market of D4, D5, and D6 on their own, as a constituent of other substances (but excluding polymers), and in mixtures in other consumer and professional products more generally. Finally, it aims to restrict the use of D4, D5, and D6 as a solvent for the dry cleaning of textiles, leather, and fur.”

The EU may seek also to add silicone to the roster of substances regulated by the United Nations’ Stockholm Convention, an international treaty that curtails the use of “persistent organic pollutants.” Satya Marar, the director of policy at the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, writes that this would “force[] countries…to comply with restrictions that fly in the face of our sovereign right to determine a regulatory approach in the interest of own consumers and their welfare.”

Indeed, basic economics itself validates Marar’s fears. In a free market, manufacturers source materials of either lesser cost or superior quality or utility. When regulation bar their access to such resources, they deliver to consumers comparatively pricier, or qualitatively worse, products. Inevitably, silicone’s impending marginalization will force affected companies to source other, less apt materials.

What’s more, just as intranational federalism generates laboratories of democracy, regulatory variation between nations promotes healthy experimentation. Properly balancing consumer safety and economic efficiency requires prudence and insight, particularly given the constant flux of markets and scientific discovery. Attempts to globalize a single regulatory approach on most major issues – which attempt to skip past the unavoidable trial-and-error stages of policy making – almost invariably do little more than calcify blanket, inflexible, and poorly conceived policies. Conversely, nation-state-level regulation allows countries to learn from one another’s successes and failures and contains those failures within national borders.

International organizations can, of course, do much good. Nonetheless, they ought to reject the temptation to micromanage the dealings of sovereign nations. And the EU ought to keep its regulatory asphyxia to itself.

David B. McGarry is a policy analyst at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.