Open Beauty Facts / Open Products Facts

Open Beauty Facts and its sibling Open Products Facts take the Open Food Facts approach and turn it on everything that is not food. Open Beauty Facts catalogues cosmetics and personal care items (shampoos, moisturisers, make-up, toothpaste, and so on), recording ingredient lists, packaging, labels, and categories; Open Products Facts stretches the same idea to general consumer goods. As with the food project, records are built by volunteers who scan a barcode and photograph the packaging and ingredient panel.

You get the data the same way as Open Food Facts: nightly bulk exports you can download in full, plus a JSON API for looking up one product by barcode. The fields line up closely with the food schema, so previous experience there transfers directly. For RAG, treat one product as one record and turn it into a short passage naming the product, its brand, and its ingredients, which lets a system answer questions like what a given cosmetic contains or which products avoid a particular ingredient.

It fits assistants for ingredient-conscious shoppers, allergen and sensitivity checking, and cosmetics research, where an open, structured product database is otherwise hard to find. The barcode index makes it a solid backbone for a scan-and-explain feature in a consumer app.

Be realistic about coverage. These projects are far smaller and patchier than the food database, so many products are missing, incomplete, or filled in inconsistently across contributors; validate any single record before relying on it. On licensing, the data is released under the Open Database Licence (ODbL), which allows commercial use but is share-alike: if you distribute a database derived from it, you must release that under the same terms and credit the source, so design your pipeline with that duty in mind from the start.

Think of it as the cosmetics-and-goods companion to Open Food Facts, and reach for the food project when you need the deepest, best-populated part of the family.