Cosmetic compliance,
rebuilt on AI.

The problem we're solving

In December 2022, the United States passed the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act (MoCRA) — the most significant update to U.S. cosmetics law in over 80 years. The European Union has had similar requirements under EC 1223/2009 for over a decade. The UK has SCPN. Canada has the Cosmetic Ingredient Hotlist. And eleven more jurisdictions each have their own rules, portals, and language requirements.

For most cosmetics brands, the response has been to hire a regulatory consultant ($150–450/hour), use a single-market submission service like Registrar Corp, or wing it. None of these scale. A typical indie brand with ten products spends $35,000–$50,000 per year on compliance work that is repetitive, error-prone, and slow.

What Cosmetica does differently

Cosmetica is built around three convictions:

• Regulatory work is mostly pattern-matching. Checking an ingredient against the EU Annexes or FDA CFR is the kind of task large language models are exceptionally good at — when grounded in the right source documents.
• Citations matter more than answers. A regulatory finding without a source is worthless. Every result we surface links directly to the underlying SCCS opinion, CIR review, FDA CFR section, EU Annex entry, or PubMed study. No hallucinations.
• Submissions should be programmatic. The FDA's ESG NextGen API supports automated submission of SPL XML files. We use it. There's no reason a product listing should require manually clicking through a portal.

The result is software that does compliance at roughly 15–40× the cost-efficiency of hiring for an equivalent capability set.

Who's behind Cosmetica

Cosmetica is built by The Zena Group, an independent software studio based in the United States. Our team works at the intersection of regulatory compliance, AI engineering, and product design.

We chose cosmetics because it's a category we know well, the regulatory burden has been growing for decades, and the tooling has been stuck in the early 2000s. MoCRA was the inflection point — for the first time, every U.S. cosmetic brand has direct FDA obligations, and the software market for handling them was wide open.