Our story
Oxford Biosciences exists to hold the regulatory floor on a brand's behalf, so the people making cosmetics can get on with making them.
The company was founded in 2013 by Allison, a clinical pharmacologist who had already been working in cosmetic safety science since 2006. The premise was simple and has not changed: the safety assessment behind a Cosmetic Product Safety Report is a scientific judgement, and the person making it should be a qualified assessor prepared to put their name to it. Too much of the market treated the CPSR as a form to be filled in. We treat it as the document that decides whether a product can legally exist.
What we have done since
In the years since, we have prepared the assessments behind more than 62,000 products now legally on the market, for over 5,000 brands. Those brands range from single-founder studios making their first balm to multinationals launching across several continents at once. On average each brand has brought us around twelve products, which tells its own story: this is not transactional, one-report-and-goodbye work, but a relationship that lasts across a catalogue and across years.
How we are built
We act as Responsible Person in both the United Kingdom, through Oxford Biosciences Ltd at the Oxford Science Park, and in the European Union, through our company registered in the Republic of Ireland. Both operate under a single quality management system, so a brand selling on both sides of the Channel is held to one consistent standard rather than two loosely connected ones.
We run three in-house laboratories. The analytical, microbiological and stability work that a safety assessment depends on is done by our own scientists and goes straight to the assessor who signs the report. We do not contract that work out, because the credibility of a conclusion depends on the data underneath it and on knowing exactly how that data was produced.
The standard, and the price of it
Two things we are quietly proud of. Every report is issued to the brand owner alone, and over the years our assessments have been copied, sometimes line for line, by others trying to pass them off as their own. We take that as a backhanded compliment about the standard. And our work has held: products we have assessed have a complete record of acceptance by the authorities that have examined them.
None of this is priced out of reach. A standard CPSR is £220, and the entry point for a single-ingredient product is £70. A regulated industry should not mean that only the largest brands can afford to be compliant, and we have built the firm so that an artisan maker and a global group can both work with the same assessors to the same standard.