Retail or Professional Lines: Can You Sell What You Use in Treatment?

A client on the couch asks whether she can buy the ampoule that just went on her face. On the trolley is the 100 ml salon size from a Korean brand, Korean text only; on the shelf by the door is nothing, because the retail order never got placed. The owner says yes, fills a 10 ml jar from the salon bottle, prints a sticker and takes twenty euros. In the eyes of the cosmetics regulation she has just become the responsible person for a product she did not make.

Her question is answered by two documents. One is the pack: European law attaches the words professional use to particular ingredients and to a labelling standard every unit must meet, never to a product class. The other is the contract with the brand, which is where "salon only" almost always lives.

The short version

• "For professional use only" in EU cosmetics law is a condition on individual Annex III substances, for example HEMA and Di-HEMA trimethylhexyl dicarbamate in nail products, entries 313 and 314, added by Regulation (EU) 2020/1682 and binding for placing on the market from 3 June 2021.
• Any cosmetic handed to a client for money must carry the full Article 19(1) labelling of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 in the language of the country of sale, and Article 6 makes the salon, as distributor, the party that checks it before sale.
• Whether a fully labelled "salon" line may be resold is decided by the reseller agreement: the Court of Justice accepted a marketplace ban for authorised distributors on 6 December 2017 (Coty, C-230/16) and rejected a total online sales ban in 2011 (Pierre Fabre, C-439/09).

Where the word professional carries legal weight

Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 is written around the product placed on the market, not around the hands that apply it. When the regulator wants a product kept from consumers it does so ingredient by ingredient in Annex III and puts the words on the pack. Regulation (EU) 2020/1682, adopted on 12 November 2020, added HEMA and Di-HEMA trimethylhexyl dicarbamate to Annex III as entries 313 and 314, restricted them to professional use in nail products, and required the label lines "For professional use only" and "Can cause an allergic reaction"; non-compliant products could not be placed on the market from 3 June 2021. Recital 8 gives the reasoning in one sentence: "Higher safety standards are expected from professionals." A product carrying that wording is restricted, and handing it to a client for home use puts a restricted cosmetic in a consumer's hands. Leave it on the trolley.

The second legal fact bites more often, because it catches the ordinary salon size of an ordinary serum. Article 19(1) makes the responsible person's EU address, the batch number, the ingredient list and the durability date mandatory on every unit, Article 19(5) ties the language to the country where the product reaches the end user, and Article 6 makes the distributor, which is you the moment you sell, the one who checks all of it. A 500 ml backbar bottle from a professional channel very often carries none of that in your language, because the brand assumed it would never be sold as a unit. For most salon sizes the answer is therefore no, and the reason is the missing labelling.

Where it is only a contract

Most professional lines in Europe are legally ordinary cosmetics, fully labelled and notified, sold in retail sizes with a reseller agreement attached. The agreement is what says salon only, no marketplaces, backbar sizes not for resale.

Those clauses are mostly enforceable, within limits the Court of Justice has drawn twice. On 6 December 2017 in Coty Germany v Parfümerie Akzente (C-230/16) the Court held that a supplier of luxury goods running a selective distribution network may prohibit its authorised distributors from selling on a third-party platform such as Amazon, provided the clause serves the image of the goods, is applied uniformly and is proportionate. The same press release recalls Pierre Fabre (C-439/09, 2011), where a blanket ban on internet sales of cosmetics was found not to be justified by prestige image. So a no-marketplace term is likely to hold, a no-online-sales term is on weak ground, and a backbar-not-for-resale term is a promise you made about a unit that cannot lawfully be sold on its own anyway.

Our view as a supplier: sign the agreement for the line you use in treatment and stock only the retail SKUs the brand releases for resale. The contract sets the channel; the pack decides whether the unit can move at all.

Why Korean lines blur it

Korean brands rarely run a separate professional business with a separate legal identity for the product. The same serum ships as a 30 ml retail unit and as a 100 ml or larger clinic size, same formula, and in our experience the CPNP notification often covers the retail unit only. Names carry "Dr.", "Lab", "Derma" and "Clinic", and none of those words creates a regulatory tier in Europe.

Korea does have a legal category that sounds like one. Article 2 of Korea's Cosmetics Act defines functional cosmetics as a class prescribed by ministerial ordinance, for products with claimed effects such as whitening and wrinkle improvement. The EU has no equivalent category: on this side of the border the product is a cosmetic like any other, its claims must be substantiated like any other, and the word functional buys nothing.

Three patterns from the treatment rooms we supply:

• A Korean derma brand is used in treatment in its clinic size and retailed in its 30 ml size. This is the clean case and the easiest shelf a studio can build, because the client goes home with what she felt. Handing it over without a sales pitch is covered in the aftercare shelf after a facial.
• A Korean "esthetic only" peel arrives from a Korean exporter with Korean labelling and an English sheet saying professional use. That phrase has no EU legal effect of its own. What matters is whether the product is notified, who its responsible person is, and whether its acid concentration sits inside the Annex III ceiling for that ingredient. Over the ceiling it cannot be sold to anyone in the EU, professional or otherwise.
• A studio decants the clinic size into small jars. Article 4(6) makes a distributor the responsible person when it modifies a product in a way that may affect compliance, and decanting is exactly that. The studio now owes a safety report, a product information file and a CPNP notification for a product it did not make.

The first pattern is how a Korean line becomes a retail shelf, and how to start selling skincare in a salon without dead stock covers what to order and how much. The other two are how the first order goes wrong.

The email to send before the first order

The rule we work to has three lines. A legal professional-only warning on the pack means no resale to anyone. Missing country-language labelling means no resale until the labelled retail SKU exists. Everything else is decided by the reseller clause. Send this before the order, not after the client asks.

For everything else a supplier owes you before you buy, from CPNP evidence to the invoice trail, the documents to ask a supplier for is the longer list.

Questions buyers ask

Do professional-only products still need CPNP notification and a responsible person?

Yes. Article 13(1) of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 requires every cosmetic product to be notified before it is placed on the market, and Article 4(1) allows only products with a designated responsible person onto the market; neither article turns on who applies the product. A studio that imports a Korean professional peel itself is the importer and, under Article 4(5), the responsible person by default.

Can I use a normal retail product on clients in treatment?

Yes. A retail cosmetic that is labelled and notified for the EU market stays a cosmetic when a professional applies it, and the regulation restricts nothing to home use. The one thing to check is the period-after-opening symbol on the pack, because a jar opened on the trolley runs down that clock at the same speed as a jar opened at home.

Can a brand stop me selling its line on my own website?

Usually not outright. Pierre Fabre (C-439/09, 2011) rejected a total ban on internet sales of cosmetics; Coty (C-230/16, 2017) accepted a ban on discernible third-party platforms inside a selective distribution system. A marketplace clause is likely to hold, a blanket online ban is weaker, and a lawyer in your country should read the exact wording before you rely on either.

Sources

• EUR-Lex, Regulation (EU) 2020/1682 amending Annex III to Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, 2020
• Court of Justice of the European Union, press release 132/17 on Coty Germany v Parfümerie Akzente, C-230/16, 2017
• EUR-Lex, Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 on cosmetic products, 2009
• Korea Consumer Agency, Cosmetics Act, English translation, 2000

Regulation (EU) 2020/1682, the Article 4, 6, 13 and 19 wording of Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 and the Court of Justice press release on C-230/16 were checked on 2 September 2026.