What NPRA Notification Means, and How to Check Any Cosmetic

Chloeya The Alpha Hair Serum is NPRA notified in Malaysia under notification number NOT250405538K, held by our own Malaysian company, Rose & Belle Enterprise, and listed on NPRA's public QUEST3+ register as CHLOEYA THE ALPHA HAIR SERUM. You can look that up yourself on the government's register in about thirty seconds, and this page shows you how.

It is notified, not approved, and that distinction is where most of the confusion in this category lives. No government approves cosmetics. Not Malaysia, not Singapore, not Europe or the United States. There is no approval process for a cosmetic to pass or fail, and no agency anywhere tests whether one works before it goes on sale. Singapore's regulator, which runs the same kind of scheme as Malaysia, is the one that says it in a sentence:

"Cosmetic products are not evaluated by HSA. Sellers of cosmetic products are responsible for the safety and quality of their products."

Health Sciences Authority, Guidelines on the Control of Cosmetic Products, section 6

I am Belle. I founded Chloeya. Here is our record, and then the check, which works on any cosmetic sold in Malaysia and not only on ours.

How to check any cosmetic on Malaysia's public register

The register is public, free, and needs no account. It takes under a minute once you know where the one setting is.

1. Go to quest3plus.bpfk.gov.my. It is a government site and it is cluttered. The search you want is the one headed Product Search, and on a phone you will need to scroll down to it.
2. Change the Product Category dropdown to Cosmetic. That dropdown starts on Pharmaceutical, and no cosmetic will ever appear while it says Pharmaceutical. This one setting is why most people conclude a product is not notified when it is.
3. Set Search By to Product Name and type at least five characters. For ours, type CHLOE. For anything else, use the name on the bottle, and if nothing comes back cut it down to the first five or six letters, because the registered name and the name on the packaging are often not identical.
4. Read the result. It comes back as a row holding three things: the notification number, the product name, and the company that holds the notification. A row means a notification exists. No row, after you have tried a shorter name fragment, means you have not found one. Ours should read NOT250405538K, CHLOEYA THE ALPHA HAIR SERUM, ROSE & BELLE ENTERPRISE. You can also switch Search By to Holder Name, which returns everything one company has notified.

The register stamps every search with the date and time you ran it, so you are reading the record as it stands today rather than a copy of it.

What the number tells you, and what it does not

A notification is a declaration the company makes about its own product. We send NPRA the formula, what the label says, and a statement that both meet Malaysia's cosmetic rules, and we take responsibility for that being true. If it is accepted, the product gets a number and can be sold. So looking one up gives you a chain of accountability: a named company, registered in Malaysia, with an address, that has put itself behind this product and can be held to it.

That is a real thing to have, and it is less than most shoppers assume. Nobody at the agency tests whether the product works, as the Singapore quote above says outright, and nobody tests whether it works in Malaysia either.

Some things are checked, though, and it is worth knowing which. A notification is refused outright if the ingredients include something Malaysia bans in cosmetics, or if the product is presented as doing a medicine's job, such as treating a disease. It can also be cancelled later. And NPRA's published post-market work includes taking samples off shelves and testing them, auditing premises, and monitoring labels, advertisements and adverse reactions. The gate at the front is a paperwork one. The real attention is at the back, which is where banned ingredients actually get found.

A Malaysian notification runs for two years and has to be renewed before it expires. Renew on time and the product keeps its original number, so the digits after NOT are the year and month it was first notified. Ours reads 2504, meaning April 2025. So an old-looking number is not a warning sign. It usually means the opposite.

It also gives you a way to check on us later. A notification allowed to lapse does not get its old number back, it gets a new one. So if you ever search the register and NOT250405538K is not what comes back, something has changed and this page is out of date. That is worth knowing about us, and about anyone else.

Why we publish ours

Most brands in this category do not give you a number. They give you a phrase, and the phrases are chosen to sound like more than they are. Approved by the Ministry of Health. Government certified. Clinically approved. If the product is a cosmetic, none of those describe anything that happened to it.

A number is different because you can go and check it, which means we can be caught if it is wrong. That is the reason ours is at the top of this page.

It also matters for where you buy. The holder on the register is the company that brought that product into Malaysia to be sold. Stock that arrived by some other route, which is often what an unofficial marketplace seller is holding, was not placed here by the holder on the register, and there is no reason to expect that holder to know how it was stored or how old it is. Ask any seller for the notification number and check it yourself. It costs nothing, and a legitimate seller will have it.

Being straight about the limit of that, since our number is printed on this page and anyone can copy it. A notification number tells you the product is notified. It cannot tell you the bottle in front of you is the real one. No register can. The only thing that answers that is buying from the company that holds the notification, which for Alpha Serum means us.

Common questions

Is Alpha Serum NPRA approved, or NPRA notified?

Notified, under notification number NOT250405538K, held by Rose & Belle Enterprise. It is not approved, and no cosmetic sold in Malaysia is. The full record is at the top of this page. If you see any brand in this category use the word approved, ask them where the approval came from.

Does a notification number mean the product is safe?

It means a named company has declared it against Malaysia's cosmetic requirements and carries responsibility for that declaration. It is not a certificate issued after testing. The safety net is the post-market side described above, where products already on sale get sampled and tested.

It is not showing up in the search. Does that mean it is not notified?

Not necessarily, and there are three ordinary explanations to work through first. The category may still be set to Pharmaceutical. The registered name may differ from the name on the bottle, so try a shorter fragment. Or the notification may sit under a parent company you would not recognise, which a holder-name search will show. If none of that finds it, ask the seller for the number directly.

Is it halal certified?

Not yet. We have begun the certification process, and we will publish the certificate here when it is issued. Until then, treating "in process" as though it were "certified" is exactly the move this page exists to argue against, so we are not going to make it. The full ingredient list is on the product page if there is something specific you want to check in the meantime.

What paperwork cannot answer

Notification is the floor. It tells you a named company is accountable for what is in the bottle. It tells you nothing about whether the bottle helps, and no regulator anywhere is going to answer that for you. That is worth saying out loud on our own page, because it is true of every serum you are choosing between, not only ours.

What we can show you is what is in ours and what people report using it. The full ingredient list is published on the product page, all of it, and our customers describe their own results, with photographs, on the results page. That is customer report, not trial evidence. On the actives themselves, we have set out what the published studies show and who was actually in them, including where the evidence is thinner than the marketing suggests.

Which leaves you deciding on the two things that are actually visible. What a company chose to put in the bottle, and whether it will show you all of it. Ours is published in full, every one of the fifty-seven ingredients in it, named. Not a highlights list of the five with trademarks after them, which is what most of this category publishes.

I am not a clinician or a regulatory consultant. This page reports what the published guidelines say and lists them below so you can read them yourself. Hair loss has many causes, and several are better answered by a blood test than by a serum. If your hair is thinning suddenly, coming out in patches, or if you have scalp pain, redness or scarring, see a doctor.

Sources

1. National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency, Guidelines for Control of Cosmetic Products in Malaysia, Second Edition. Sections 2.7 and 2.10 for the two-year validity, the renewal deadline and the notification number format; sections 4.1 and 4.2 for post-market surveillance and sampling; sections 5.1 and 5.2 for refusal and cancellation of a notification; glossary for the definition of the Cosmetic Notification Holder.
2. Health Sciences Authority, Singapore, Guidelines on the Control of Cosmetic Products, GUIDE-CHP-200-004, section 6, for the statement that cosmetic products are not evaluated by HSA.
3. NPRA QUEST3+ product search, quest3plus.bpfk.gov.my, the source of the record reproduced above.