What customs charges on cosmetics, and which regulator signs off before we get there.

PSQCA — the Pakistan Standards and Quality Control Authority — holds a compulsory certification list, and nine cosmetic and toiletry items sit on it by name, each against its own Pakistan Standard: toothpaste, toilet soap, shampoo, powder and liquid hair dye, skin cream, shaving cream, skin powder, and hair cream. A consignment of any of those needs a PSQCA licence and the certification mark before we take it to the terminal. It is not a formality we can promise our way around.

Decorative colour cosmetics — lipstick, eye make-up, nail polish, foundation — are not on that list. What catches those instead is the valuation ruling below. A different category again is medicated cosmetics: a whitening cream or a shampoo making a therapeutic claim moves to DRAP, the Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan, under its own Act rather than under PSQCA. We ask which one a shipment actually is before we build the file, because assuming DRAP for an ordinary face cream wastes as much time as assuming PSQCA for a medicated one.

The gap between those two nail polish figures is the reason the brand named on the invoice matters more than the shade, the packaging, or what the box says it does. The same ruling repeats the pattern across lipstick, eye make-up and foundation: a name on its list is assessed at one number regardless of where it was made, and everything else falls to a lower number split by country of origin. Get the brand line on the invoice wrong, in either direction, and the declaration is assessed against goods that are not quite the ones in the container.

Sales tax runs on a separate track entirely. Perfumes and beauty preparations are Third Schedule goods, which means sales tax is charged on the retail price rather than the assessed customs value, and that price, tax included, has to be printed on the pack before it moves — the law puts that on the importer as much as the manufacturer. We work out the correct figure against the current rate before a packaging run goes ahead, rather than after cartons already carry the wrong number and have to be pulled back.