In the ‘good old days’, International Fragrance Association (IFRA) Standards were the biggest regulatory problem that a perfumer faced during creation.
Perfumers would perform the IFRA maths in their head while hand writing their fragrance formulations.
Older perfumers complained that soon there would be too many IFRA restricted ingredients to remember.
Jump forward 15 years and a veteran perfumer confided in me that increasing problems with fragrance legislation was actually the fault of computers.
He reasoned that, without computers, it would not be possible to calculate the answers to all the regulatory questions, and he had a point.
Leaping forward another 15 years to now and I can imagine the line charting sophistication in computing is matched by that charting complexity in regulatory compliance.
Simply put, there is more of it and more complexity in it, and it keeps changing.