Microbial Quality Control: The 'easy way'

The Standard Way:

The standard procedure to perform microbial quality control in cosmetics (ISO 18415) is to cultivate one 1g or 1ml of product in two nutrition media for at least 24h: one suitable for bacteria, one for yeast and fungi. This ensures that a positive result is caused only by living cells.

If one of these cultures is positive a second round of cultivation is required with selective media in order to exclude the presence of the four “specified microorganisms” (according to ISO 18415):

• Candida albicans
• Pseudomonas aeruginosa
• Staphylococcus aureus
• Escherichia coli

This second round of cultivation takes approx. 48h in order to be save.

The ’easy way':

An alternative procedure is to perform exactly the same first cultivation as in the standard way, but:

If one of these tests is positive, test for the “specified microorganisms”:

• perform the easyFlow^® QC Combo 1 to exclude Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli
• perform the easyLAMP^© Candida albicans to exclude Candida albicans

Both test-kits can use the same first enrichment culture!

Take advantage of the easyFlow^® and easyLAMP^© kits and speed up your microbial quality control!

Even Faster

For some product matrices the testing for “non-specified microorganisms” (ISO 18415) could be even faster by reducing the time for the first cultivation. The easyFlow^® Bacteria and easyFlow^® Yeast&Mould test-kits are able to detect microbial RNA in the culture earlier (e.g. after 8 hours) than a classical read-out of these cultures (after 24 hours).

Please note:

It is the sole responsibility of the user to validate that these test-kits perform equally compared to cultivation with each product matrix!