Halal certification is an assurance, not a skin benefit
As halal certification spreads across cosmetics in Southeast Asia, brands are tempted to advertise the mark as if it made a product gentler or cleaner. It does not, and using it that way weakens both the religious assurance and the brand's own claims.
Every Lumarind product carries a halal mark, and in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei the mark matters a great deal to the people who buy from us. For a Muslim household, a certified shampoo or face cream removes a question that would otherwise have to be answered ingredient by ingredient: whether anything in it, or anything used to make it, is prohibited. That assurance is valuable, and it is earned through work most shoppers never see: approved suppliers for every material, segregated storage, cleaning procedures, audits and a halal committee at each of our plants.
Because the mark is valuable, marketers are tempted to make it carry more than it should. I have seen briefs, including some written by my own team, that present halal as a synonym for gentle, pure, natural, safe for sensitive skin or free of harsh chemicals. None of those qualities follows from certification. A certified product can irritate sensitive skin. An uncertified product may contain nothing prohibited at all. When a brand blurs the two, it borrows the authority of a religious assurance to sell a performance claim it has not proved.
What the mark promises, and to whom
The halal mark is a statement about permissibility and process, issued by a recognised certifying body after inspection. In Malaysia and Indonesia the bodies entitled to certify are set out in law, and only their marks, or marks they recognise, may be used. Indonesia has been phasing in mandatory certification across product categories, cosmetics among them, which means halal status is becoming a condition of sale rather than a point of difference. In Singapore, certification is administered by the Islamic Religious Council. Our head of halal assurance and the certifying bodies decide what qualifies. My team decides only how we talk about it.
That division matters because questions of permissibility are not marketing questions. Whether a particular alcohol, a glycerin from an unidentified source or an animal-derived ingredient is acceptable is settled by the certifier's standards and, where needed, by religious authorities. A copywriter who answers those questions in an advertisement, or a host who answers them in a livestream, is speaking for an authority they do not represent.
The audience is also wider than marketers assume. Non-Muslim shoppers in Singapore, the Philippines and Vietnam increasingly see halal marks on cosmetics, and some read them as a seal of quality. That reading is understandable, and it is not our job to encourage it. If we let the mark stand for quality, we invite every shopper, Muslim or not, to feel misled the first time a certified product disappoints.
When the logo is asked to sell softness
In 2021 an Embunsari cleanser campaign in Malaysia used a line saying that a halal formula was naturally kinder to skin. It tested well. Our head of regulatory affairs, Nur Syafiqah Rosli, asked what evidence supported kinder. The honest answer was that the cleanser was mild because of its surfactant system, which had been tested for skin tolerance, and that its certification had nothing to do with it. We rewrote the line to make the mildness claim on its own evidence and to state the certification separately and plainly. The rewritten campaign tested slightly worse. We ran it anyway.
The same temptation appears with ingredient claims. Free-from claims, such as alcohol-free, paraben-free or no animal ingredients, are popular in our markets and are sometimes heard as halal claims under another name. Some are useful information. Others imply that a permitted ingredient is dangerous, which is unfair to competitors and to the science. Our rule is that a free-from claim must be true, must answer a concern shoppers actually have, and must not suggest that an ingredient regulators allow is harmful. In ASEAN markets a cosmetic's claims must be supported by evidence held in its product information file, and a free-from claim is a claim like any other.
There is a commercial reason for restraint as well as an ethical one. As certification becomes universal in Indonesia, brands that built their identity on halal alone will find it shared by every product beside them on the shelf. Embunsari's distinctiveness has to rest on what it does for skin and how it feels to use. The halal mark should be present, accurate and quiet.
Keeping faith and formulation in separate files
We now manage halal and performance as two files with different owners. The halal file, held by our halal assurance team, contains certificates, supplier approvals and audit reports, and it decides where the mark may appear and in what words. The claims file, held by regulatory affairs, contains the evidence for every statement about what a product does. An advertisement may draw on both, but one may never be used to support the other. The word because is not allowed to join them.
In practice this produces a few plain rules. We say certified halal, with the certifier's mark where it is required, and add no adjectives. We do not compare our certification with competitors' or suggest that uncertified products are unsafe. Hosts and creators have an approved answer to questions about certification and refer anything more detailed to customer care, which passes it to our halal team. Every certificate behind a claim in our advertising has an expiry date that compliance monitors, because a lapsed certificate behind a live claim is a serious failure.
For a board, the useful questions are short. Who owns halal assurance, and do they report independently of marketing? How many advertisements in the past year were changed because they linked halal to a benefit? If a certificate lapsed at one plant tomorrow, which products, markets and claims would be affected, and how quickly could the company withdraw them? A board that hears confident answers can be reasonably sure the mark is protecting the company rather than being spent by it.
I am a Chinese Singaporean who has sold halal products for most of my career, and I have learnt to be careful about speaking for a faith that is not mine. That care is, in the end, the whole argument. The halal mark belongs to the people who rely on it and the authorities who stand behind it. A brand is entitled to earn it and to display it. It is not entitled to turn it into a promise about skin.