Arcus Compliance launches SaaS assistant to track beauty regulations

Regulatory consultancy Arcus Compliance has launched a SaaS (software as a service) tool to streamline monitoring and adherence to UK and European regulatory requirements. Mavryx Assistant is designed to support founders, start-ups, and brands in the beauty industry. 

The “arduous but vital task” of keeping up to date on global cosmetics regulations can pose a burden on beauty businesses. They have to keep track of all updates and amendments that relate to their products and future innovations. 

According to Arcus, compliance professionals currently spend approximately 15% of their working week — roughly a full day — researching regulations. 

The centralized command center aims to significantly reduce the amount of time founders need to manually monitor compliance, ensure products meet requirements, and stay ahead of changes.

The release comes as retailers and consumers increasingly scrutinize the safety of beauty solutions and their ingredients, demanding compliant products.

In its latest annual report, the European Commission found that cosmetics were the most frequently reported dangerous products in the EU. The annual Safety Gate Report also revealed that a record number of dangerous cosmetics were withdrawn from the market in 2025. 

Arcus cites the EU Safety Gate announcing its highest-ever number of alerts as a “clear reason” brands need support regarding compliance. “In this age of increased enforcement, businesses are subject to commercial as well as compliance risks,” says the regulatory advisory firm. 

Mavryx Assistant aims to tackle what Lee Bryan, founder of Arcus Compliance, sees as the main driver of those alerts: brands growing faster than their compliance systems. He previously told Personal Care Insights that cosmetics made up 36% of the 4,671 alerts recorded in 2025, a pattern he called “not a blip, a structural failure across the industry.”

“It is happening not because brands are reckless, but because growth has consistently outpaced governance,” Bryan said.

Closing rules and reformulation gap

Mavryx Assistant was built using Arcus’s consultancy knowledge bank. The tool draws on years of experience and the latest relevant regulations, which are continuously updated. Key features include a written or audio summary of the latest compliance news, an overview of the regulatory horizon, an ingredients checker, portfolio monitoring, and a chat assistant for extra support.Lee Bryan says brand growth has outpaced compliance governance. 

The ingredients checker is one of Mavryx Assistant’s key features. By providing information on new and impending ingredient bans, the tool highlights in advance which products require reformulation and counts the days until the ban comes into effect. The system was designed to be ideal for businesses with a portfolio of products and numerous formulations to resolve potential issues before deadlines.

The UK-based consultancy says that Mavryx Assistant does not replace the need for independent regulatory advice, but aids and accelerates the decision-making process. 

“By asking simple questions, founders will receive the technical information required to meet their obligations and their specific needs, rather than having to wade through pages of information which are not always applicable,” explains the company.

The cost of falling behind on ingredient restrictions is already visible in enforcement data. Speaking to Personal Care Insights earlier this year, Bryan illustrated that in 2024, 97% of all chemical risk alerts for cosmetics on the EU Safety Gate were traced back to a single banned ingredient, BMHCA (butylphenyl methylpropional), a synthetic fragrance that has been prohibited since March 2022. 

“That means three years after a ban came into force, products containing that ingredient were still being placed on the market at scale. That is not a knowledge problem. It is a systems problem,” said Bryan. 

“The regulatory infrastructure for knowing which ingredients are restricted has existed for years. What has not kept pace is the internal compliance architecture that flags those changes, reviews product portfolios against them, and triggers reformulation before enforcement acts rather than after.”

Mavryx Assistant is Arcus’s answer to that gap. The tool cross-references regulatory changes against a brand’s own formulations, turning a ban like that on BMHCA from a line in a regulatory update into a task tied to the specific products affected.

Compliance as a competitive edge

For Bryan, compliance is a weapon for founder-led beauty and personal care brands in regulated markets. Arcus Compliance launches Mavryx Assistant for beauty founders in the EU and UK. 

“For years, real regulatory intelligence has sat behind the walls of big multinationals with in-house teams. Mavryx Assistant is about leveling the playing field. Founders get the answers, the regulatory horizon, and their ingredient checks in plain English, so they can stop guessing, punch up, and compete with brands many times their size,” he says. 

Mavryx Assistant is designed to give fast-growing product portfolios structure and a reliable record of what has changed and why. This is particularly helpful for founders, start-ups, and smaller brands that may lack in-house regulatory teams. 

According to Arcus, most brands manage compliance through email, spreadsheets, and memory. The company says that method works until it doesn’t. 

“A missed adverse event report, a formulation change that never made it into the product information file, a labeling update that the team knows about but the record does not reflect. These are not dramatic failures. They are the slow, invisible drift that enforcement finds,” it details. 

Bryan previously told us that compliance gaps can grow as brands scale. “Brands scale their revenue, their SKU count, their market footprint, and their compliance infrastructure stays exactly where it was when the business was a fraction of the size.”

Mavryx Assistant is available in English, Korean, Spanish, and Chinese, with more planned to follow. It is available now for brands selling into the UK and Europe. Rollout across the US and Asia is set to take place in Q1 2027, before it becomes available globally in mid-2027.