About

About this site

Parapharmacy.org is an English-language reference site on the European parapharmacy category — what it is in each country, which EU and national rules apply, which ingredients are commonly encountered, and how the principal product categories are regulated.

Purpose

The parapharmacy category is documented primarily in French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German. English-language sources are scattered and often confined to industry or marketing literature. This site aims to provide a single, neutral, citable English reference for general readers, students, journalists, expatriates and importers who need to understand the field.

What you will find here

• Foundations — what parapharmacy is, country pages for France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Belgium, and a short history of the category.
• Regulation — the principal EU instruments that govern parapharmacy products: cosmetics, medical devices, food supplements, health claims, and CE marking.
• Ingredients — reference entries on common cosmetic actives and other substances encountered in parapharmacy products.
• Categories — sunscreens, cleansers, moisturisers, retinoid skincare, oral rehydration, wound care, thermometers, compression stockings.
• Terminology — a glossary, multilingual translation tables and a guide to reading INCI ingredient lists.
• Sources — annotated links to regulatory and evidence databases.

What you will not find here

Parapharmacy.org does not provide medical, dosing or treatment advice; does not recommend products or brands; carries no affiliate links; and does not solicit or store personal data. The site is text-only static HTML, designed to be readable on any device and durable across time. It uses aggregate analytics and may carry contextual advertising to cover running costs — see Hosting and privacy below, and the methodology page for the full set of rules under which it is written.

Maintainer

The site is maintained on an independent basis; any advertising revenue offsets hosting and running costs only. Authorship is not personally attributed: entries are written with reference to primary sources and intended to stand on the strength of those sources rather than on the standing of an individual author. No advertiser, sponsor or other commercial party funds or directs the editorial line.

Corrections and contact

Corrections of fact, broken links, outdated regulatory citations and other improvements are welcome. A public contact address will be added on this page; in the interim, corrections may be sent through any external channel where the site is referenced (for example, replies to citations on social platforms). The correction policy is set out in detail on the methodology page.

Licensing

Text on this site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Code is under the MIT licence. Reuse is permitted with attribution; commercial reuse is permitted under the same terms. Where this site quotes or paraphrases material from a primary source under fair-use or fair-dealing principles, the source is linked.

Hosting and privacy

The site is delivered as static HTML. It uses Google Analytics (the Google tag) to measure aggregate, anonymised traffic, which sets analytics cookies; it does not run first-party marketing or cross-site tracking of its own. To help cover running costs the site may display contextual advertising served by Google AdSense — declared in ads.txt — kept clearly separate from editorial content, which advertising never influences. There are no third-party fonts or stylesheets, no embedded videos and no social-media widgets. Server logs, where they exist, are minimal and are not used to build profiles or to track individuals across sites.

Last reviewed: May 2026.