The EU Pigment Ban Is Not Under Review — It Is in Court, and Britain Just Went Stricter

Ask around any European studio and you will hear some version of it: the blue and green ban is being looked at again, the Commission has to review it, there is a case coming that will overturn it.

We went through the regulation, the consultation registry, the petitions and the court filings. The ban is not under review. There is no review to be under.

What is happening is a court fight, and the first round was lost.

The rule has never been touched

Pigment Blue 15:3 and Pigment Green 7 came under restriction on 4 January 2023, two years after the rest of the tattoo-ink restriction, under a derogation written into entry 75 of REACH Annex XVII.

That entry has never been amended since. We checked this against the consolidated Regulation 1907/2006 as it stood on 11 May 2026. EU consolidated texts carry amendment markers, and entry 75 opens with a single marker — the 2020 regulation that created it — with none anywhere inside it. The entries either side of it carry later markers. So the silence around entry 75 is real, not an artefact of how the document is assembled.

There is no review clause. That is the part people get wrong.

The belief that the Commission must revisit the pigment ban appears to rest on nothing.

The word "review" does not appear anywhere in Regulation (EU) 2020/2081 — not in the recitals, not in the enacting terms, not in the Annex. Nor does "re-examine". The regulation has exactly two articles: one amending Annex XVII, one setting the entry-into-force date. No reporting obligation. No re-examination date. No sunset.

Entry 75 itself contains no review clause either.

This matters because it changes what a working artist should do. A restriction with a review clause is a restriction you can wait out. This one has no mechanism to revisit it short of the Commission choosing to start over, or a court striking it down.

Why these two were caught at all

This is the part most artists have wrong, and it changes how the ban reads.

Neither pigment is classified as a carcinogen. They were not swept in through the cancer route. They were caught through the cosmetics route: entry 75 automatically restricts anything listed in Annex II of the EU Cosmetics Regulation, and these two are on it because they are banned in hair colours.

The Risk Assessment Committee's finding was that the risk "could not be ruled out for the majority of these colorants, primarily due to the lack of adequate information on their hazard properties." That is an evidence-gap ban, not an evidence-of-harm ban — a distinction worth holding on to, because it cuts both ways. Nobody demonstrated these pigments cause harm. Nobody demonstrated they do not.

One more detail that explains a great deal of the anger. Industry argued in consultation that only these two colourants were genuinely essential, because no safer technically adequate alternatives existed. The Socio-Economic Analysis Committee agreed they needed longer and recommended a 36-month derogation. The Commission granted 24. That halving, made against its own committee's advice, is the origin of the backlash.

The industry asked. The answer was no, twice.

There was a formal attempt, and it was not a small one. European Parliament Petition No 1072/2020 asked for the pigments to be kept and gathered 178,201 supporters. The Commission replied on 8 March 2021, and the reason it gave is uncomfortable reading:

"The Risk Assessment Committee (RAC) did not support the requested derogation, as the risk of cancer as well as the non-carcinogenic hazards could not be ruled out, primarily due to the lack of adequate information in general and the stakeholders' failure to submit additional data on their safety."

The pigments were not restricted because they were proven dangerous. They were restricted because nobody proved they were safe, and the industry that was asked for data did not supply it.

The Commission's position:

"The Commission considers that the protection of human health from potentially hazardous substances, where safety for injection into the human body has not been sufficiently proven, needs to prevail."

A second reply in March 2022 acknowledged the difficulty of finding alternatives but offered only an information session, not regulatory relief. We found nothing after that.

What is actually live: three court cases

The real action moved to the General Court of the European Union, brought by French tattooists represented by the same lawyer.

T-294/24 — Syndicat National des Artistes Tatoueurs and Auville v Commission. A damages claim plus a plea that Regulation 2020/2081 is illegal. Dismissed on 19 September 2025. The Court's own case-law keywords include the phrase "action manifestly lacking any foundation in law". The applicants paid the Commission's costs. Denmark and ECHA had both intervened on the Commission's side.

Four further actions are still pending, all brought by French tattooists in December 2025 and all represented by the same lawyer:

• T-876/25 — Jean-Denis Raja, lodged 19 December 2025. EUR 8,264 plus EUR 10,000.
• T-910/25 — Gabrielle Ragoo, 29 December 2025. EUR 7,750.69 plus EUR 10,000.
• T-911/25 — Kévin Pernin, 29 December 2025. EUR 13,116 plus EUR 10,000.
• T-912/25 — Gonzalez, 29 December 2025.

All four seek damages and ask the Court to disapply and annul the regulation — which matters, because the dismissed case sought damages alone. An annulment action is the one route that could actually unwind entry 75.

Raja's plea has four parts, in the Court's wording: that "there was a lack of conclusive evidence"; that "the Commission breached the principle of equality"; that there was "an infringement of the freedom to conduct a business"; and "misuse of the precautionary principle". Pernin's is described as similar or identical.

These were filed after the first attempt was thrown out as manifestly unfounded, which tells you something about how the applicants rate their chances and about how the Court has received the argument so far.

Britain went the other way — and ended up stricter

The EU restriction was not carried across into UK law after Brexit. Britain ran its own review, and for a while it looked like it would be the escape route.

The Health and Safety Executive, acting as the UK REACH agency, recommended in June 2023 derogating 19 pigments — including Pigment Blue 15:3 and Pigment Green 7 — on the basis that it had "not identified evidence indicating they are unsafe."

The Minister rejected that. In a decision taken on 30 December 2025 and published on 15 January 2026, Defra restricted all 19, reasoning that HSE "did not identify evidence that these 19 substances are safe… only concluding that it did not identify evidence that they were unsafe." The Minister also chose tighter concentration limits than HSE had preferred.

Two practical consequences. GB and EU limits are now different numbers on different timetables, so a single label cannot be assumed to satisfy both markets. And the statutory instrument has not actually been made yet — the draft still reads "apply after [date]". Working back from the stated two-year and three-year transitions, full GB compliance lands somewhere around 2028. There is no fixed British compliance date today.

What this means at the bench

• Do not plan around a reversal. There is no review, no consultation, no call for evidence, and no "Have your say" initiative — the Commission's public consultation portal returns zero results for "tattoo". The last call for evidence on this closed in 2016.
• Two pending cases are not a likely reversal. They are damages claims. Even if one succeeded on liability, that compensates the applicant; it does not automatically put the pigments back on your shelf.
• The blue and green you can still buy are reformulations, not a legal exception. If a supplier is selling you the original pigments for tattoo use in the EU, that is an enforcement question, not a loophole. Independent testing has found banned pigments still on sale.

What we could not check

ECHA's website sits behind a bot filter that refused every route we tried, including archived-page proxies. We worked around it using the EU Publications Office's machine-readable mirror of the Official Journal, ECHA's separate chemicals API, and web archive captures — including an ECHA page captured on 11 March 2026, which still describes only the 2017–2019 committee process and lists nothing newer than a March 2022 information session.

Two things remain genuinely unconfirmed and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

We could not establish whether either pigment was ever placed on ECHA's substance evaluation list (CoRAP). Neither is on the 2025–2027 plan. The cumulative list was unreachable. We tried ECHA's chemicals API and it appeared to answer — but a control test on a substance we knew is on CoRAP showed the same blank result, proving that dataset does not carry CoRAP information at all. Its silence means nothing, so we are recording this as unknown rather than as a clean negative.

We also could not read a corrigendum to the 2020 regulation, which the EU's own system holds a record of but serves no content for, and we found no petition correspondence after March 2022 — though the live Parliament register is also bot-gated, so absence there is weaker evidence than the rest of this piece.