MFDS Notice No. 2025-63 (revised 2 September 2025) is the consolidated Korean cosmetics safety standard. Article 6(2) sets detection allowances for substances that were not added on purpose, that can be shown to have come from packaging migration or a similar unintentional path, and that cannot be completely removed by current technique. The metal allowances are in micrograms per gram.
Key numbers
Article 6(2), distribution cosmetics, µg/g:
| Entry | Analyte as named | Allowance |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lead | 50 µg/g or below for powder products that use clay as a raw material; 20 µg/g or below for other products |
| 2 | Nickel | 35 µg/g or below for eye makeup; 30 µg/g or below for color makeup; 10 µg/g or below for other products |
| 3 | Arsenic | 10 µg/g or below |
| 4 | Mercury | 1 µg/g or below |
| 5 | Antimony | 10 µg/g or below |
| 6 | Cadmium | 5 µg/g or below |
Arsenic and mercury in this article are not speciated. They are recorded as total arsenic and total mercury. The same paragraph also sets non-metal allowances (1,4-dioxane 100 µg/g, methanol 0.2 percent v/v with a wet-wipe sublimit of 0.002 percent v/v, formaldehyde 2000 µg/g with a wet-wipe sublimit of 20 µg/g, and a phthalate sum of 100 µg/g). Those are not metal rows.
Article 6(8) sets a separate allowance labelled “heavy metals” at 20 µg/g or below, and arsenic at 5 µg/g or below, on permanent-wave and hair-straightener agent solutions. That heavy-metal line is a combined test. A lead standard solution appears in the lead test method elsewhere in the notice. The 20 µg/g figure is not an ICP-MS lead result and is not used as the Article 6(2) lead allowance.
Methods (brief)
The notice is a consolidated regulation. Article 6(1) points the test method to Annex 4, and allows another method when its scientific validity is accepted. The text read for this update is the Korean consolidated PDF whose hash matches this page.
Evidence fitness
Article 6(2) supports the Korean detection allowances for the six metals on distribution cosmetics. It does not support an inorganic-arsenic or methylmercury number. The Article 6(8) combined heavy-metal allowance does not replace the lead row in Article 6(2).
Limitations
The source text is Korean. The English wording on this page is a translation of Article 6(2) and the heavy-metal clause in Article 6(8). The raw file hash and path are unchanged from the existing source record. This update adds the article numbers to the page body.
Related evidence
Update history
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