The question we get most: "Where's our Prior Notice filing?"
If your team has ever imported food into the U.S., you already know Prior Notice — the Bioterrorism Act requirement to notify FDA before a food shipment arrives, so the agency can flag it for inspection. It's a reasonable instinct to look for a cosmetics equivalent. There isn't one. Prior Notice is written into the FD&C Act specifically for food, and MoCRA did not create a parallel pre-arrival notification regime for cosmetics. No Prior Notice number, no advance filing, no separate clock to beat before your shipment leaves the origin port.
That doesn't mean cosmetics move through customs unchecked. It means the checkpoint is structured differently — based on standing registration and listing data rather than a shipment-by-shipment filing.
What actually happens at the border
When a cosmetics shipment arrives, CBP entry data is checked against FDA's records — specifically, whether the manufacturing facility named on the shipment has an active Cosmetics Direct registration and whether the product itself has a current listing tied to that facility's FEI. This is the practical mechanism that replaces a Prior Notice filing: instead of notifying FDA about this specific shipment in advance, you keep your registration and listing current, and the system checks against that standing record automatically.
- Active registration + current listing — shipment proceeds through normal customs processing.
- Lapsed, missing, or mismatched registration — shipment is flagged for further review, which can mean delay, examination, or in some cases refusal of entry.
- Product appears misbranded or adulterated on its face — FDA can refuse entry independent of registration status, the same authority it has always held over cosmetics under the FD&C Act's misbranding and adulteration provisions.
Why registration lapses are the real risk, not filing deadlines
Because there's no shipment-level filing to miss, the risk for cosmetics importers shifts almost entirely onto keeping the standing record accurate: an unregistered new facility, a registration that lapsed at its two-year renewal anniversary, or a product that was reformulated but never re-listed. Any of these will surface as a mismatch at the border even though nothing about the individual shipment was filed incorrectly — because nothing about the individual shipment gets filed at all.
Practical takeaway: for cosmetics, import readiness is a registration and listing hygiene problem, not a per-shipment paperwork problem. Get the facility and product records right once, keep them current, and individual shipments largely take care of themselves.
Import alerts
Separately from routine screening, FDA maintains import alerts that can apply detention-without-physical-examination status to specific products, manufacturers, or countries of origin where past shipments have shown a pattern of violations — contamination, undeclared ingredients, or unsubstantiated claims, for example. Being named on an active import alert is a different and more serious problem than a registration mismatch, and typically requires a documented corrective action history before FDA will remove the listing.
The bottom line
Don't build a Prior Notice-style pre-shipment process for cosmetics — you'd be solving a problem that doesn't exist for this product category, and it would divert attention from the thing that actually matters: making sure your facility registration and product listings are accurate and renewed before goods ever leave the dock.