A banned dye, a K-beauty cream, and a supplier registered in Singapore

Hong Kong Customs told people in late July to stop using a collagen cream. It said its Government Laboratory found Sudan Red in the jar it bought and tested, a dye cosmetics there are not allowed to contain. The Korean brand behind the cream denies it and says an accredited lab found none. Both statements are still on the table.

Yesterday we published how to check whether your salmon DNA serum is the real thing, which was about reading labels. This is about what turns up when someone tests the contents.

What did Hong Kong Customs say?

On 24 July it issued a public alert about one model of collagen cream. Customs said its Government Laboratory found Sudan Red, which the cosmetics standards there prohibit, so it asked shops to clear the product and asked people to stop using it. It flagged the packaging too, for carrying warnings in English and Korean only when its regulation requires Chinese.

The release never prints a brand name. Customs published two photographs of the packaging and whited out the brand mark on both. What the photographs do show is the product name, PDRN Pink Collagen Capsule Cream. News outlets identified the brand afterwards, and Medicube then published a statement about the product.

What does the brand say?

Medicube, the brand run by the Korean company APR, denies the finding. It published a statement on its Hong Kong site saying an accredited Korean testing organisation tested the product and returned a result of not detected for Sudan Red, and that it had given the report to Customs. It has since cited other laboratories as well, including a Chinese testing house that tested in mid June and Intertek. It also says the cream sold in Hong Kong has used an updated formula since March, as a precaution.

Two findings, several laboratories. What nobody has published is a batch code. That is the detail that would settle it. Where a dye arrives through a contaminated ingredient it need not be in every tub on every shelf, which is one explanation for two different results. It is not the only one, and nobody has established which applies here.

Why does this keep happening?

Because a lot of unrelated products used one compound raw material, and not only red ones. Taiwan's regulator had to explain publicly that several of the affected products look white.

China went first. In October a private testing outfit, DaddyLab, published results showing Sudan IV in a run of skincare products and in the red compound raw material behind them, at around 1,170 parts per million. It blurred the supplier's name in its own video. Readers and then reporters worked out which company it was.

Taiwan's regulator was the first authority to act. It learned in late October that some Chinese made cosmetics might contain Sudan dyes and followed the trail to a red compound raw material containing neem leaf extract. It named the supplier as Campo Research, a company registered in Singapore. Campo Research rejects that finding. It says its own accredited testing found no Sudan dyes, and it has instructed lawyers to ask Taiwan's regulator to withdraw its name.

Taiwan's health ministry then published something genuinely useful: the products that used the material, named, with their batch numbers. The running count reached 39 products across 13 companies, ordinary things, lip oils and hair lotions and masks. Some entries on that list are semi finished goods or products that never went on sale, and several companies were recorded as not having used the material at all. Three batches of the raw material itself measured 1,177, 1,151 and 1,486 parts per million of Sudan IV.

In April, prosecutors in Taoyuan indicted the head of the Taiwanese importer, Yih Hong, accused of selling on contaminated material after a client warned him. Prosecutors say he had contacted the Singapore supplier, which told him to stop distributing it, and that he carried on anyway.

Korea followed in February. Its Ministry of Food and Drug Safety worked through 567 products made with material from the same manufacturer, found Scarlet Red in two of them, a lip oil and a children's lip balm, and ordered both recalled and destroyed. Scarlet Red is the same dye Taiwan measured, Sudan IV. The other 565 came back clean.

What is Sudan Red?

A family of industrial dyes for waxes, oils and solvents, the sort of material that will not take a water based colour. Cheap, stable, strong red, which is why they turn up where they should not. Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, China and Singapore all prohibit the dye at issue here in cosmetics. The European Union bans Sudan I and Sudan IV but still permits Sudan III as a colorant, so long as it is kept out of products used on the lips, eyes and other mucous membranes. Regulators point to concerns about cancer risk. Nobody is saying a jar of face cream will make you ill. A banned substance does not need a safe dose to be worth taking out.

Where does that leave a shopper here?

With less protection than most people assume. Nobody approves cosmetics in Singapore before they go on sale. A company notifies the Health Sciences Authority that it is putting a product on the market, and HSA says on its own site that this does not mean the product is approved by HSA. Dealers are directly responsible for the safety of what they sell. HSA samples the market afterwards and alerts the public when it finds something.

Singapore does prohibit Sudan dyes in cosmetics. Taiwan's regulator asked HSA about it in November and was told exactly that, and that HSA would look into it.

So what do you do about the cream in your cabinet?

• Do not clear out your whole shelf. One authority flagged one product, and the maker disputes it.
• Find your batch code. It is the small stamped code on the base or the crimp, not the expiry date. Any recall that reaches here will be written in batch numbers.
• If it bothers you, stop using it. You can set a jar aside while laboratories disagree. It is a moisturiser, not medicine.
• Watch HSA's own alerts, not the group chat. Reviews tell you how a cream feels. They tell you nothing about the pigment that went into it.

What we take from it

One compound raw material moved through a shared supply chain, and testers and regulators in four places raised the alarm at four different times, all of them after the products were already selling. China found it because a private lab went looking. Hong Kong found it by reading the news and buying a jar. The checking sits downstream of the buying everywhere, and a brand's popularity tells you nothing about the ingredients it was sold.

We import from Japan, and nothing we stock appears on any of these lists. We have not audited our suppliers down to the pigment, which is the gap this whole story is about. What changed for us is a habit: we now ask who made the raw material and not only who made the product, and we keep batch codes on everything we bring in.

We have tested nothing ourselves and we are not a laboratory. Most of the above comes from the regulators' own announcements and the companies' own statements. Where we have relied on news reporting or on private testing, we have said so. Where the parties disagree, we left the disagreement standing.

Sources

• Hong Kong Customs, alert on one model of unsafe collagen cream (info.gov.hk)
• Taiwan Ministry of Health and Welfare, product list and batch numbers for the red compound raw material (mohw.gov.tw)
• Campo Research, its own response to the Taiwan finding (campo-research.com)
• Health Sciences Authority Singapore, how cosmetic products are regulated (hsa.gov.sg)