Our commitment is to deliver a premium quality product and in doing so, we take a very conservative approach to expiration dating so as to ensure that the product meets the highest standards for quality within the framework of supporting technical data.
We aim to ship products with a minimum expiration date of at least 6 months from the date of your purchase. This timeframe provides ample time for products to be resold for consumer use. Based on stock levels, supply chain, ingredient sourcing and other factors this may sometimes vary from product to product and we may ship some items with a shorter expiration than 6 months from date of purchase. Periodically we will place items with a shorter expiration date on sale identifying in the header of the product page the expiration date as well as a final sale statement.
As part of our global compliance initiative, we conduct extensive safety and efficacy testing including testing to assess the product’s integrity over time when stored in a variety of temperature and humidity conditions. We do this to ensure that our products will deliver on their promise of quality and effectiveness even when exposed to stress conditions of elevated temperature and humidity that may be encountered during transportation as well as to comply with global compliance regulations for cosmetic and drug products.
Expiration dating of cosmetic products is not a universal regulatory requirement. IMAGE Skincare is a global brand and our products must meet requirements outside the US as well. In the EU and many other countries, stability testing results in a date of durability or alternatively, a Period After Opening (PAO) declaration symbolically represented by a symbol of an open jar with the number of months a product will maintain optimal performance after opening. This symbol is usually found on the back of the package, near our address. Satisfactory test results allow us to label products with the expiration periods indicated on the packaging. These dates can be found on either the crimp of a tube or printed on the bottom of a jar or pump configuration near the product’s lot number.
For our OTC products sold in the US, such as the Prevention + and Clear Cell collection, the compliance regulations are slightly different than those for cosmetic products but always based on the same testing standards. We initiate this testing and when we reach a satisfactory outcome at the first test milestone, we are able to label these products with the corresponding expiration date. In some cases as testing continues and we reach a second test milestone, the expiration date can be expanded. This will explain why you may occasionally see a different expiration date over labeled on some OTC products in the same collection.