Foundations

A short history of parapharmacy

Parapharmacy as a recognisable retail category is a product of the late twentieth century, shaped by the post-war professionalisation of cosmetics, the legal codification of medicine sale across Europe, and the gradual liberalisation of non-prescription health products under the EU single market.

Origins of the term

The word parapharmacie is documented in French commercial and regulatory writing from the second half of the twentieth century, alongside the steady codification of pharmacy law in continental Europe. The Greek prefix para- ("beside, alongside") had been used in earlier neologisms — paramedical, paramedic, paramedicine — to designate professional and commercial activities adjacent to, but distinct from, the regulated core of medicine and pharmacy. Parapharmacie followed the same construction: products and outlets that operate beside the pharmacy without being one.

Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese borrowed the term as parafarmacia and parafarmácia. The English language did not develop a native equivalent: American "drugstore" and British "chemist" already had distinct meanings. As a result, English-language regulatory and trade literature has tended to use either the loanwords or descriptive paraphrases ("non-pharmacy health retail", "health and personal-care category").

Post-war cosmetics and pharmacy

From the 1950s onward, the professional cosmetics industry in France and Italy developed a category of skin-care products positioned by reference to the pharmacy: products available in pharmacies, formulated with attention to skin tolerance, and marketed to patients with sensitive or compromised skin. This sales channel became known in French as cosmétique en pharmacie or, later, dermocosmétique. The pharmacy was the natural sales channel because pharmacists were trusted intermediaries on questions of skin and because the products often used ingredients (mineral UV filters, certain acids, certain plant extracts) that had a pharmaceutical pedigree.

As the dermocosmetic category grew, two parallel developments followed. First, dedicated retail formats opened outside pharmacies to sell these products at lower margins. Second, regulators across Europe were asked, repeatedly, to define the boundary between a cosmetic and a medicinal product — a question that has been arbitrated by national courts and by the Court of Justice of the European Union on multiple occasions. The criterion that emerged at EU level — presentation as treating disease, or function as a pharmacological agent — remains the governing test.

Single-market pressure

The EU single market created pressure on national pharmacy monopolies in two ways. First, the EU's product-by-product harmonisation of cosmetics (originally Directive 76/768/EEC, later Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009), food supplements (Directive 2002/46/EC), and medical devices (the medical-device directives, and now Regulation (EU) 2017/745) created uniform product rules across Member States, which made cross-border retail of these products easier and reduced any rationale for keeping them within the pharmacy monopoly. Second, the Court of Justice's case law on freedom of establishment and free movement of goods scrutinised national restrictions on who may sell what, requiring Member States to justify them on public-health grounds.

The Court has consistently held that pharmacy ownership and density rules can be justified for public-health reasons (notably in joined cases C-171/07 and C-172/07, 2009, and C-531/06, 2009). But the more peripheral the product is to the dispensation of medicines, the harder it is for a Member State to justify keeping its sale within the pharmacy monopoly. This logic has supported the gradual opening of non-prescription medicine sale in several Member States.

Italian and Portuguese liberalisations

Two national reforms stand out. In Portugal, Decreto-Lei n.º 134/2005 of 16 August allowed non-prescription medicines to be sold outside pharmacies, in establishments registered with INFARMED. In Italy, Decreto-legge 4 luglio 2006, n. 223 (the Bersani decree), converted into Legge 4 agosto 2006, n. 248, opened the sale of non-prescription medicines to parafarmacie and to supermarket aisles, subject to the presence of a registered pharmacist. Both reforms were politically contested and both have been the subject of subsequent litigation, regulatory adjustment and academic study.

The reforms did not extend to prescription medicines, which remain reserved to pharmacies in all EU Member States. They also did not extend to compounding and to the clinical pharmacy services attached to dispensation. Their effect was confined to non-prescription products, and within that range, they produced visible shifts in price and retail structure in the affected markets.

The rise of dermocosmetics

Independently of the medicines-sale liberalisations, the dermocosmetics market grew steadily in the 1990s and 2000s, with the increasing prominence of brands originally distributed through pharmacies and later available in dedicated parapharmacies, beauty chains and online. The growth of sun protection as a year-round product category, of acne-targeted skincare, and of "sensitive skin" formulations all contributed. Active ingredients first used in prescription dermatology — vitamin A derivatives, salicylic acid, niacinamide, ceramides — were re-formulated for cosmetic-grade applications and entered mass distribution. The category pages on this site describe these in detail.

Where the category stands today

The parapharmacy category in 2026 is, structurally, what the regulatory choices of the 1990s and 2000s made it: an open retail tier for cosmetics, supplements and devices in every EU Member State, plus a parallel non-prescription medicines tier in Italy and Portugal, plus the pharmacy as the sole channel for prescription medicines and (in France, Spain, Belgium) all medicines. The boundaries shift slowly: occasional reclassifications of individual products move them between categories; occasional changes in national law adjust what may be sold outside pharmacies. The EU-level regulatory architecture — separate regimes for cosmetics, devices and supplements — has been stable since the late 2000s and is the reference framework for the entire category.

Last reviewed: May 2026.