About Compliance Advisor

Why this exists

For more than 20 years, I’ve watched the same thing happen over and over. Someone makes a really good product. They design a label they’re proud of. Then somebody makes a well-intended comment in a Facebook group, or says something at a craft fair, and suddenly there’s a little seed of doubt: Wait. Is my label actually right?

And then the fun begins. You start searching. You find three different answers to the same question. You try to make sense of the FDA website. Then you find the actual regulations and discover that they weren’t exactly written for someone sitting at a kitchen table trying to get product labeled before the show … tomorrow. Eventually, you start wondering if maybe the rules were written for somebody else. Anybody else.

They weren’t.

Federal labeling requirements apply to a one-person soap business just as they apply to a company with a factory and a regulatory department. The difference is that the big company has people whose entire job is figuring this stuff out. You have a kitchen table and whatever you can find online at eleven at night.

Compliance Advisor is my answer to that.

Why it’s a subscription

For a long time, there were basically three ways to get this information from me: buy a book, book a consultation, or catch me at a conference. All three work, but all three have a gate on them.

A book can explain the rules, but it can’t look at your label. A consultation gives you my direct attention, but there’s a definite cost and it doesn’t happen immediately or overnight. And a conference is wonderful, but it happens once or twice a year, in a city you may or may not be going to.

Meanwhile, the questions don’t arrive on a schedule.

They show up on Friday night when you have to have products ready for a show on Saturday morning. They show up when a customer asks you something you don’t know how to answer and you really don’t want to guess. They show up when you’re researching a new product and run across something alarming online. And sometimes they show up at exactly the moment when waiting two weeks for an opening on my calendar just isn’t practical.

You need the answer when you need the answer — not when it happens to be convenient for me.

That’s why I built Compliance Advisor as a subscription. The checking tools, the reference material, and access to me are all in one place, for one predictable monthly cost. Once you’re a member, you don’t have to stop and think, Is this question worth paying somebody to answer? You can just check the label when the label is in front of you, look up the ingredient you’re wondering about, or ask the question that’s been bugging you. It can be eleven at night. That’s fine. That’s when you’re working. (Just a note, though — if you use the “Ask Marie” feature, I might not be up at eleven at night, so for that you’d have to wait a little bit.)

There’s another reason I like this model. If I answer the same question 400 times individually, that helps 400 people — but it takes a lot of time. (And believe me, there actually ARE a few questions I’ve answered 400 times to 400 different people!)

If I turn that answer into a tool, add it to the library, or cover it on a call that everyone can attend, I can help a lot more people at once. That means I can put my time where it does the most good and keep the cost low enough that getting an answer doesn’t have to be a big financial decision.

That’s really the whole idea: ready when you need it, affordable enough that you’ll actually use it, and coming from someone who has actually read the regulations.

More details are on the subscription page.

About using AI

I want to be very clear about this, because it’s one of the first questions a lot of people have.

In my experience, if you ask an AI chatbot about soap and cosmetic labeling, you’ll often get an answer that is almost right. And almost right isn’t good enough for a label. It will give you the general shape of the requirement and then get an important detail wrong. Or it will apply a cosmetic rule to a product that legally isn’t a cosmetic (or vice versa). Or it will confidently tell you something that is true in Europe but not in the US. Ask it to review a label and you can get the same thing: convincing, mostly right, and not something I’d put on a product.

There’s a reason for that, and it isn’t that the technology is bad. AI learns from what’s out there, and what’s out there about soap and cosmetic labeling includes a lot of misinformation. Articles copying other articles. Answers in Facebook groups from people who are absolutely certain — and absolutely wrong (or even just partly wrong). Supplier websites repeating something that was never true in the first place. I’ve been correcting the same handful of labeling myths for more than 20 years. Believe me, I’ve seen them all.

Unfortunately, AI has learned from all of that too, and it can’t reliably tell the difference between a source that actually knows what it’s talking about and a source that is simply repeating something it found somewhere else.

So here’s exactly how I use AI in Compliance Advisor.

The Label Quick Check and the Label Full Check use AI for one job: reading your label. The AI looks at your image and reports what it sees — where the text is, what it says, how large it appears, and so forth. That’s it, and it’s genuinely excellent at that job.

Everything after that is programmed logic based on my own rules. Those rules come from the regulations and from more than two decades of doing this work by hand. The AI does not decide whether your label passes. It doesn’t interpret the regulations or make judgment calls. It reads. My rules decide.

None of the other Compliance Advisor tools use AI at all. They are all programmed from compiled, reliable and verifiable data.

There are a few other places where I use AI, and I want to be completely transparent about those, too. I used AI heavily to help write the code behind this site. It’s very good at that, and it’s a big part of how one person was able to build something this size. (I’m good, but I’m not THAT good.) I also use it to help draft written material, including some of the material on this site. But I’ve never once taken an AI draft and simply put my name on it. Every word gets reviewed, rewritten, and checked against what I know to be true, because AI will hand me something close and wrong just as readily as it will hand it to you. Finally, I use it for some business and personal administrative and record-keeping chores.

Who’s behind it

Me. That’s the whole list.

I’m Marie Gale. I’ve been working on soap and cosmetic labeling for more than 20 years, I’ve written five books on it, and I served as President of the Handcrafted Soap and Cosmetic Guild from 2004 to 2009. I wrote the rules the checking tools run on, I built the site, and I’m the one who answers when you use “Ask Marie.”

There’s more about me if you’d like it.

When a tool isn’t the right answer

Not everything belongs in a tool. If you have an entire product line going to print, you’re getting ready to sell in Canada or the EU, or there’s something in your formulation that no checklist could anticipate, what you probably want is a person, not a tool.

I still take consulting clients and still do private label reviews. That work is one-to-one and it’s separate from the subscription — it always has been. The consulting page explains how it works.

I’m always happy to hear from you

If you have a question, a suggestion, or an idea for something you think would be useful, tell me. I read everything that comes in.

That goes for the tools, too. If a check gives you a result that doesn’t make sense, I want to know. If you wish there were a tool for something I haven’t built yet, tell me that, too. A good part of what’s here exists because somebody wrote to me and said, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” Sometimes the answer is yes.

The contact form is the fastest way to reach me.