Bath Salts, Soap, and the Law: Why Witchy Makers Need to Know About Cosmetic Safety Assessments

Walk through any pagan fair, moot, or spiritual marketplace in the UK and you'll find tables covered in beautifully made things: ritual bath salts blended with rose petals and intention, soap bars pressed with sigils, anointing oils, smoke-cleansing sprays, "hex-breaking" scrubs. These products are made with real skill and real care. What's often missing, though, is the paperwork that UK law says has to sit behind them before they're ever sold — and that gap can land well-meaning makers in serious trouble.

This isn't a niche technicality. It applies to almost everyone selling bath, body, or skincare items in Great Britain, whether you're a full-time herbalist-witch with an Etsy shop or someone who sells a few jars at a Saturday market to fund their craft.

"It's natural, it's small-batch, surely that's fine?"

This is the single most common misunderstanding, and it's an easy one to fall into — especially in spiritual and witchcraft communities, where there's often a strong ethic of self-sufficiency, folk knowledge, and suspicion of corporate or bureaucratic systems. The instinct is understandable: these are products rooted in tradition, made by hand, often passed down from a grandmother's recipe or learned from a craft elder. They feel personal, not industrial.

But UK law doesn't distinguish between a kitchen-table maker and a large manufacturer. If you are making a product that's applied to the skin or hair and offering it for sale, gift, or even as part of a giveaway or spell kit, it's legally classed as a cosmetic product — and the same rules apply to you as apply to a factory.

Bath salts, soap bars, anointing and ritual oils that are placed onto the skin,  bath bombs, scrubs, salves, balms, washes, and similar items all fall under this definition, regardless of how small your operation is or how "natural" your ingredients are.

What the law actually requires

The relevant framework is the UK Cosmetic Products Regulation (the retained version of EU Regulation 1223/2009), enforced through the Cosmetic Products Enforcement Regulations. In practice, before you can legally sell a cosmetic product in Great Britain, you need to do three things for each product:

Appoint a Responsible Person. This is usually you, the maker, if you're based in the UK. This person takes legal responsibility for the product's safety.

Get a Cosmetic Product Safety Report (CPSR). This is a formal safety assessment carried out by a qualified, registered safety assessor — someone with a toxicology, pharmacy, or related background. They review your full formulation, every ingredient and its concentration, how the product is used, who might use it, and whether it's safe under normal and reasonably foreseeable use. For water-containing products, this usually also involves preservative efficacy and stability testing. This is not a badge or certificate you print out yourself; it's a signed professional document, and it forms the core of your Product Information File (PIF), which you're legally required to keep for ten years after a product's last batch is made.

Notify the product. Once the CPSR is in place, the product has to be registered through the UK's Submit Cosmetic Product Notifications (SCPN) service, run by the Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS), before it goes on the market.

A few details that catch out small makers in particular: a "lavender bath salt" and a "rose bath salt" using the same base recipe count as two separate products, each needing its own assessment, because the formulations differ. Selling something as a free gift, a giveaway prize, or part of a ritual kit doesn't exempt it — if someone else is going to use it, it needs the same safety paperwork as anything sold outright. And if you change so much as one essential oil in a formula, your existing CPSR is no longer valid for the new version.

Why this matters more, not less, in spiritual practice

There's a particular tension here worth naming directly. A lot of bath and body work in witchcraft and spiritual traditions leans on foraged or wildcrafted botanicals, herbal infusions made up by feel, and ingredient combinations chosen for symbolic or energetic meaning rather than cosmetic chemistry. That's a beautiful part of the craft — but it's also exactly where the safety risks the law is trying to catch tend to show up: contamination from wild-harvested plant material, unknown allergens, essential oils used at levels that aren't skin-safe, or interactions between ingredients that haven't been tested together. Reputable assessors will often decline to certify products containing wild-foraged botanicals for this reason, and will ask for commercially sourced, traceable ingredients instead.

None of this is about stripping the spirituality or intention out of what you make. The ritual, the correspondences, the intention-setting — none of that is regulated and none of it needs to change. What the law cares about is what happens when the product touches someone's skin.

What this is not

It's worth being clear about what cosmetic safety assessment doesn't cover, because it sometimes gets conflated with other concerns. A CPSR has nothing to do with the spiritual claims on your label — you're free to describe a soap as cleansing negative energy or a salt blend as supporting a banishing ritual. Where the law does step in is around medical-sounding claims: you can't market a balm as treating eczema or a salve as curing anything, since that strays into medicines regulation rather than cosmetics. The safety assessment is purely about physical safety: ingredients, concentrations, microbiology, and proper labelling — not about the meaning or intention behind the product.

What it costs and how long it takes

For most small makers, getting a single product properly assessed and notified costs somewhere under a few hundred pounds and takes a matter of weeks rather than months, particularly if you use ingredients with existing safety data (many suppliers can speed this up considerably). Several UK-based assessors now offer packages aimed specifically at small and hobbyist producers, sometimes bundling several scent or herb variations of one base recipe together to bring the cost down. It is, realistically, a normal part of the cost of starting this kind of business — in the same category as insurance or trading standards registration, not an optional extra.

The risk of skipping it

Trading without a valid CPSR and SCPN notification isn't a grey area enforcement-wise. Selling unassessed cosmetic products can result in enforcement action from Trading Standards, fines, and in some cases prosecution, on top of the very real risk of someone having an adverse skin reaction to a product that was never properly checked. For a small spiritual business built on trust and word of mouth, that kind of incident can be far more damaging than the cost of doing the assessment in the first place.

Practical next steps

If you're currently selling, or planning to sell, bath salts, soap, oils, or similar items:

Register your business with HMRC if you haven't already. Work out which of your products are genuinely separate formulations versus simple variants, since each will need its own report. Source your ingredients from suppliers who can provide proper documentation (safety data sheets, allergen statements) rather than relying solely on wild-harvested material. Find a qualified safety assessor — several now work specifically with small UK craft and natural-product makers and understand handmade, small-batch production. And budget the time: a CPSR can take anywhere from a few days to several weeks depending on your formulation and the assessor's workload, so it's worth starting this well before a launch date or market booking.

Doing this properly doesn't make your work less magical. If anything, it's an act of care toward the people who use what you make — which is, after all, very much in keeping with the spirit most of this community already brings to their craft.

All products that can be classed as Cosmetic that I sell or giveaway are fully assessed for your and my safety.