Shipping nail supplies from China to Taiwan: what simply cannot be sent, and what only needs an ingredient check

Official rules table: shippability, law, ingredients, duties

Every row comes from statutory text, an official search system or an official announcement (verified on 2026-09-06). Where officials have published nothing, or where this round of checking could not retrieve it, the entry reads "not found" and nothing is filled in by guesswork.

Every entry in this table comes from statutory text, an official search system or an official announcement, and nothing marked "not found" is filled in by guesswork. HowBridge ships only from China (the Shenzhen warehouse) to Taiwan; it does not order goods for you, does not bid for you, does not advance payments, and does not offer declared-value cover or added insurance. Tariff classification and duty rates are settled by Customs, and whether dangerous goods can be carried depends on the carrier's rules and the outcome of the declaration.

Tariff, import rules and cosmetic law

The tariff gate is in fact open. What really needs understanding is the shape of cosmetic law after 2024: it is looser than most people assume, but loose in places other than the ones they expect.

• The blank in these three subheadings is a genuine blank: checked one by one in the International Trade Administration import and export regulation search, nail polish (3304.30.10.00-9), nail polish remover (3304.30.20.00-7) and other nail cosmetics (3304.30.90.00-2) carry no code at all in either the import or the export regulation column, and all three subheadings took effect on 1989-01-01. Manicure scissors (8213.00.20.00-3), manicure implements including nail files (8214.20.00.00-2) and nail brushes (9603.29.00.00-0) are likewise blank. Searching the Chinese product names for nail art, gel curing and press-on nails returns 0 records in every case, so such goods are classified into general subheadings by material and function.
• Gel polish and curing gel are cosmetics: under the definition in Article 3 of the Cosmetic Hygiene and Safety Act and the table of the scope and categories of cosmetics announced by the Ministry of Health and Welfare (Announcement No. 1131608175, effective 2026-07-01), category 12, nail cosmetics, lists nail polish, nail polish remover, nail lotions and nail creams, and "other". Gel polish, curing gel and cuticle oil fall under "other" and are all governed by this Act rather than treated as ordinary chemicals.
• Registration is now history: Article 5, Paragraph 7 of the Cosmetic Hygiene and Safety Act provides that the registration requirement for specific-purpose cosmetics "shall cease to apply five years after the entry into force of the provisions amended on 2018-04-10", a date that fell on 2024-07-01. The accompanying table of ingredient names and use restrictions for specific-purpose cosmetics, the permit issuance regulations and the case-by-case import approval regulations have all been repealed. Ordinary cosmetics never required registration in the first place, and the only management tools left today are the product listing and the product information file.
• So the "personal-use quantity limit" no longer has any basis: the only official quantity threshold that ever applied was the "quantity limit for specific-purpose cosmetics imported for personal use and exempt from registration", repealed together with registration itself on 2024-07-01 (Announcement No. 1131603792). With registration gone, the exemption limit attached to it is gone as well. This page gives no "bottles per person" figure, because officials no longer publish one.
• The duty to file a product listing rests on businesses: Article 2 of the Regulations for Cosmetic Product Listing enumerates "cosmetic manufacturers or importers of a certain scale" in three groups: companies or business firms required to register under the Company Act or the Business Registration Act; factories required to complete registration under Article 8, Paragraph 1 of the Act; and other groups or juristic persons apart from handmade soap operators exempt from factory registration. Natural persons are not among them. A listing must name every ingredient in the product, must state a percentage wherever a limit applies, stays valid for 3 years, and must be filed afresh when ingredients change.
• A few neighbouring subheadings that are easy to trip over: pure acetone (2914.11.00.00-8) and some acrylic polymer raw materials (3906.90.10.00-8) carry import regulation 508, but those are chemical raw materials, not finished nail polish remover; polyester-based paints and varnishes (3208.10.91 / 92) carry C02; ultraviolet or infrared apparatus (9018.20.00.00-8) carries 504MW0, a medical device heading under which mainland China goods may not be imported. A nail lamp is a beauty appliance and would not normally land here, but a product imported on the strength of medical or therapeutic claims runs straight into the double restriction on that subheading.

The statutes, announcements and search results in this section were verified on 2026-09-06. On duty rates, the tariff database on this site shows 0% in column I and 12.5% in column III for 3304.30, but the Customs Administration rate search requires browser interaction, so this round could not independently cross-check those two figures against an official system; the Customs assessment governs. The FDA border inspection section currently lists only food, medicinal products, medical devices and Chinese herbal materials, with no cosmetics; the full table of exemption codes used by approving agencies likewise holds no code specific to cosmetics.

Prohibited and restricted ingredients: where the red lines are

Article 6 of the Cosmetic Hygiene and Safety Act empowers the competent authority to announce prohibited and restricted ingredients. The nail-related rules sit in two separate tables, the prohibited ingredient table and the restricted ingredient table, and the two categories are constantly confused with each other.

• Three ingredients that really are prohibited: methyl methacrylate (MMA, CAS 80-62-6) appears in the prohibited ingredient table for cosmetics with no attached condition; formaldehyde (CAS 50-00-0) is prohibited, though the remarks record that where DMDM Hydantoin, Imidazolidinyl urea, Quaternium-15, Bronopol and similar substances are used as preservatives, total released free formaldehyde may not exceed 1,000 ppm; dibutyl phthalate (DBP, CAS 84-74-2) is prohibited, with the remarks covering natural residues the manufacturing process cannot technically avoid, for which total phthalate residue in the finished product may not exceed 100 ppm. Mercury and its compounds are prohibited as well, with impurity residue not to exceed 1 ppm.
• Toluene is restricted, not prohibited, and this is the point most often written up wrongly: toluene (Toluene, CAS 108-88-3) appears as item 19 of the restricted ingredient table for cosmetics, with a scope of use covering nail products, a limit of 25%, and a required warning, "keep out of reach of children". Calling toluene a prohibited ingredient, or treating any product that contains it as a violation, is wrong on both counts.
• Camphor is restricted as well: camphor (Bornan-2-one) is capped at 3%, and where a product may be used on children under two years of age it must carry the statement "consult a physician or pharmacist before use on children under two years of age" (rinse-off products are exempt).
• Two further restricted ingredients bear directly on nail work: toluenesulfonamide/formaldehyde resin (Arylsulfonamide-formaldehyde resin) is capped at 25% in nail products; potassium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide used in nail cuticle remover are capped at 5% and must carry the statement "contains strong alkali; avoid contact with the eyes during use as blindness may result; store out of reach of children".
• A brand saying it excludes an ingredient is making a statement about its own formula: the OPI official page lists the ingredients its nail polish ranges exclude (formaldehyde, formaldehyde resin, toluene, xylene, camphor, parabens, ethyl tosylamide, dibutyl phthalate and triphenyl phosphate), and notes that the professional range also contains no HEMA and no TPO; but the label the brand itself uses is "Thoughtfully Formulated", and it has never used the "3-free" or "7-free" style of wording that circulates elsewhere. The Essie official FAQ, for its part, makes no free-of claim at all, stating instead that nail polish cannot be regarded as hypoallergenic and advising readers to check the ingredient list on the product page and consult a physician.
• Limits carry an effective date, so quote the date with the figure: on 2025-11-06 the Food and Drug Administration announced an amendment to the restricted ingredient table for cosmetics, effective 2027-10-01. The limits on this page reflect checks made on 2026-09-06 and should be reconfirmed before 2027.

Every limit and remark in this section is taken verbatim from the official fields of the FDA database of prohibited and restricted cosmetic ingredients. A brand saying it excludes an ingredient is describing its own formula and is not a health risk assessment of that ingredient and not a comparison with other brands; this page draws no such inference.

Curing lamps and powered devices: classification changes the answer

Nail curing lamps and electric nail files are powered appliances, so the rules that apply to them are nothing like the rules for nail polish, and one and the same lamp can be classified under two tariff subheadings that lead to opposite conclusions.

• Classified under 9405 or under 8543, the answer differs: as a complete lamp assembly, a nail curing machine most likely falls under 9405 (other electric table, desk, bedside or floor-standing lamps, 9405.29.00.00-0; those designed for use solely with LED light sources, 9405.21.00.00-8), and these subheadings carry C02, meaning they follow the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection list of commodities subject to inspection. It may equally be classified under 8543.70.99.90-6, "other electrical machines and apparatus", which carries C02MP1.
• The 8543 route is a dead end: in the mainland China goods search, 8543.70.99.90-6 carries the note EX, and the International Trade Administration explains that "the note EX means only goods matching the Chinese and English product descriptions under that subheading are open to import". The EX open list runs to about 75 items (electric mosquito swatters, frequency dividers, ultraviolet insect traps, industrial ultraviolet LED irradiators and the like) and does not include nail lamps, curing lamps or nail dryers. In other words, a China-made nail lamp classified under this subheading falls outside the open scope. A classification dispute changes the import answer outright, and this page does not pre-empt the Customs decision.
• A bare bulb is not the same as a complete lamp: the import regulation for ultraviolet lamps (8539.49.10.00-5) is blank, so they are not subject to inspection, while LED lamps (8539.52.00.00-1) carry C02. Buying a replacement tube and buying a whole lamp fall under different rules.
• Wattage is all the brands publish: the CND official Q&A states an input power of 36W for its LED lamp and reads, in the original, "LED lamps emit a combination of UV and visible light"; the Gelish official comparison table gives 36W for both 18G Unplugged and 18G Plus, and 3W for Touch LED. Neither brand publishes a wavelength figure. CND adds one line that is useful to buyers abroad: its LED lamp is built for global voltage with interchangeable plugs (Global power, removable cord with interchangeable plug adapters), but warranty on a unit bought overseas must be taken up with the seller.
• No official specification exists for electric nail files: among the brand pages checked this time, not one states a voltage, wattage or rotation speed, and all that appears are indirect descriptions in the product names such as "EU Type Plug", "USB Portable", "rechargeable" and "Wireless". That is enough to show the device does need a power supply, but not enough to support any statement about voltage compatibility or about how inspection rules would apply, and this page fills in no figures for them. The specific commodity names and CNS numbers on the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection list could not be retrieved this time because the search results load dynamically, so they are recorded as not found.

No dedicated safety standard or exposure limit for ultraviolet nail lamps was found within the official sources used for this round, and this page quotes no unofficial recommended value. The actual tariff classification of a lamp and its inspection obligations are settled by Customs and the Bureau of Standards, Metrology and Inspection.

Chinese marketplaces, shipping cost and official brand statements

Very little official text can be retrieved from the marketplaces, while on the brand side several widely repeated claims turn out to have no traceable source. On cost, nail supplies are typically many items at a low unit price, which makes it easy to cross the duty-free threshold in a single order.

• Failing to retrieve a marketplace category rule is not the same as "there is no rule": on Taobao, Tmall and Pinduoduo the robots.txt of the rules sites tested as site-wide Disallow, while the JD rules centre carries no such restriction but loads its text through JavaScript. All of these are recorded here as could not be verified rather than as not found, and nothing was circumvented. The only official Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan text obtained is the JD Worldwide site description, which states that it covers Taiwan, includes beauty among its categories and offers consolidated shipping. None of the four marketplaces yielded the original text of a prohibited-item list covering nail polish, remover or acetone-containing products.
• Shippability has to be judged against Taiwan law: whether a marketplace lists nail polish as a prohibited item is one question, and the Regulations for Postal Item Handling and the Regulations Governing Air Transport of Dangerous Goods in Taiwan are another, and it is the latter that decides. A marketplace accepting the order and dispatching the goods does not mean the parcel is compliant at the Taiwan end.
• On cost, nail supplies mean many items at a low unit price: for HowBridge sea express the chargeable weight is the greater of actual weight and volumetric weight (length × width × height ÷ 10000), rounded up, at NT$50 per unit, with a NT$100 delivery fee added when the actual weight is under 10 kilograms; air freight counts actual weight only at NT$100 per kilogram, with no volumetric calculation and no delivery fee. A single bottle of nail polish is light, so weight is rarely the issue. The issue is that buying a few dozen bottles at once crosses the NT$2,000 duty-free threshold.
• Splitting a shipment does not enlarge the duty-free allowance: customs values are aggregated. The postal consignment regulations require aggregation where the same sender consigns to the same consignee with the same arrival date, and the air express regulations state plainly that goods in one consignment may not be declared separately. Customs value is CIF, so freight and insurance are included (Customs Act, Article 29, Paragraph 3).
• Only one official Taiwan channel could be found: of the five international brands checked, only Sally Hansen has an official Traditional Chinese site for Taiwan, and its official store locator lists Watsons and Poya as the Taiwan retailers. No official Taiwan site was found for OPI, Essie or Gelish. The CND official distributor lookup tool would not open this time, which counts as could not be verified rather than "does not exist", and cannot be taken as evidence that CND has no authorised distribution in Taiwan.
• Two widely repeated claims with no traceable source: the first is that "the manufacturer warns against mixing lamps between brands", a sentence found nowhere on the official pages of any of the five brands. The closest CND comes is a recommendation to use a complete system and to stay with its own LED or UV lamp, which is a system recommendation rather than a safety warning and must not be upgraded into one. The second is the description of OPI as "X-free" and of Essie as "3-free, without toluene, formaldehyde or DBP"; no official source was found for either. Separately, the material of press-on nails (ABS, for example) is stated nowhere on the brands' official product pages, and this page does not fill it in for them.

The rates are the published HowBridge rates (sea express NT$50 per unit, air freight NT$100 per kilogram, sea LCL consolidation from NT$25/kg or NT$150/cu ft) and follow the same method as the shipping cost calculator on this site; the quotation given when you place the order governs. This page quotes no brand prices and performs no currency conversion or price-difference percentages.

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