Legal document No 4555, issued on March 12 by the Health Ministry's Drug Administration, has banned firms or individuals from producing and selling cosmetics containing ingredients of human origin.

Deputy head of the administration Nguyen Viet Hung said that the ban came after a variety of cosmetics, now on sale online, were advertised as having ingredients extracted from human placenta or produced by stem-cell technology.

According to the administration, the use of all human-origin ingredients in cosmetics is banned. The administration has not issued distribution permits to cosmetics extracted from the human placenta or produced by stem-cell technology.-VNA