OFFICE CLOSED

Dear Customers....Our office will be closed from the 1st August to the 12th August. All orders will be processed on our return.

EXPIRY DATES

We have had some customers asking about the expiry dates on our products.......we have contacted our suppliers in South Africa to answer your questions. We asked them to explain how they establish the expiry dates and what the life expectancy of the products is.....this is their reply:

Feedback from our Pharmacist is as follows:

An expiry date is the date placed on the container/label of a product designating the time during which a batch of the product is expected to remain within the approved shelf-life specification, if stored under defined conditions and after which it should not be used.

It doesn't make sense to designate an expiry date with day/month/year because it would imply that it is possible to determine the day on which the product will no longer be suitable for use.

For medicines the expiry date is usually determined for the active ingredient.  For most medicines the product expires when the active ingredient breaks down to less than 95% of the original concentration.

For cosmetics, however, there is no single “active” ingredient and it is usually the retention of its physical properties that determines the shelf-life.  This depends of course on the intrinsic properties of the formula, the process control during manufacturing, as well as on storage conditions.  It is, therefore, also not possible to tie it down to a specific day of the month.  If it states Oct 2007, it means at the end of October 2007.

There is a legal requirement under the cosmetic safety regulations that under normal conditions of storage, the product should be safe and effective to use for a period of 30 months.  If it is stable to last 30 months, it is not even necessary to put an expiry date on the product.  If it is not, you have to put on an expiry date.  Since some of our products do not last 30 months, we decided to put expiry dates on all the products.

We trust that this background information clarifies the matter.