COSMOS Organic: What the Standard Certifies, and What It Does Not

Scope

COSMOS certifies two distinct things under one scheme: (1) finished cosmetic products, which after third-party audit may bear the COSMOS ORGANIC or COSMOS NATURAL logo on pack, and (2) raw materials, which independently carry COSMOS CERTIFIED (organic-origin) or COSMOS APPROVED (non-organic but permitted) signatures. The standard's own stated scope, chapters on ingredients, composition, manufacturing, environmental management, packaging, labelling, and inspection, does not include efficacy testing, skin-sensitivity or allergenicity assessment, or dermatological-suitability claims; those topics are absent from the standard's six-chapter scope description and fall under separate cosmetics safety regulation, not COSMOS certification. Core distinction: a product bearing the COSMOS ORGANIC or NATURAL logo has itself been submitted, audited and certified as a whole formulation against the full standard. A product that merely uses a COSMOS CERTIFIED organic raw material as one ingredient has NOT been certified as a product and may not bear the COSMOS logo, nor be marketed or named as organic (e.g. organic shampoo) unless the whole product is at least 95% organic by weight, confirmed directly by accredited certifier ACO: the product must not be called organic unless it is at least 95% organic measured as a percent of the total product; below that threshold, wording is restricted to ingredient-level references such as shampoo with organic jojoba oil. The Labelling Guide narrows permitted ingredient-level wording further to phrases such as from organic agriculture (physically processed agro-ingredients) or made using organic ingredients (chemically processed agro-ingredients), and permits COSMOS ORGANIC certified as pack wording even when the product is below 95% organic, provided the product itself holds COSMOS ORGANIC certification. Organic-percentage calculation basis: water and non-agro minerals are always excluded from the organic-percentage figure; for physically processed agro-ingredients the organic fraction is calculated from the certified-organic input material; for chemically processed agro-ingredients it is calculated as organic starting primary raw materials, net of any in excess, divided by all starting primary raw materials, net of any in excess, times 100. Certifier and secondary summaries, not independently confirmed by direct text extraction of the Criteria PDF which could not be parsed to plain text in this research, additionally describe minimum-content thresholds for COSMOS ORGANIC certification of roughly 95% organic physically-processed agro-ingredients and an overall minimum organic content of 20% for leave-on products and 10% for rinse-off products; these figures are flagged as certifier-sourced rather than a verbatim Criteria-document quote and should be verified against the primary Criteria PDF before being treated as exact.

Issuer

COSMOS-standard AISBL, the international non-profit standard-owner founded by BDIH (Germany), Cosmebio and Ecocert Greenlife (France), ICEA (Italy), and Soil Association Certification (UK). The AISBL owns and publishes the standard; certification against it is delivered by accredited third-party certification bodies (e.g. Ecocert, Soil Association Certification, ICEA, ACO), not by the AISBL itself.

Version

Criteria document Version 4.2 (current). History: v4.0 applicable 1 January 2023; v4.1 applicable 1 March 2024; v4.2 applicable 1 September 2025. Per cosmos-standard.org, v4.1 and v4.2 contain no criteria changes versus v4.0, only editorial updates. Companion documents: Technical Guide v4.2 and Labelling Guide v4.0.

Standard name

COSMOS-standard: product signatures COSMOS ORGANIC and COSMOS NATURAL; raw-material signatures COSMOS CERTIFIED and COSMOS APPROVED

Effective date

1 September 2025, the date Criteria v4.2 became applicable, per COSMOS-standard AISBL's own Documents page (v4.0: 1 January 2023; v4.1: 1 March 2024, same underlying criteria).

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