Costume jewellery imported from China: 49,512 items stopped in Genoa

MONDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 2026

Cadmium up to 49.1% by weight and lead up to 4.95%, against European limits of 0.01% and 0.05%. In the same container, 720 pairs of sunglasses with no CE mark.

Costume jewellery imported from China was at the centre of a customs check that ended badly: on 21 September the Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency and the II Group of the Genoa Financial Police seized 49,512 items — necklaces, bracelets, rings, earrings and pendants — that had arrived in a container at the Genoa Pra' port basin, consigned to an Italian importing company. The seizure was not triggered by a missing document, but by laboratory analysis.

What was found in the container

The Agency's chemical laboratories looked for three metals: cadmium, lead and nickel. They found all three in concentrations above the thresholds set by European health protection rules. Sunglasses were travelling in the same load, were checked separately and failed too; for the pairs carrying a CE mark but no documentation, attempted commercial fraud has been alleged.

• Cadmium: up to 49.1% by weight in the samples analysed, against a European limit of 0.01%.
• Lead: up to 4.95% by weight, against a limit of 0.05%.
• Nickel: detected above the permitted release thresholds, with no measured value made public.
• 49,512 items of costume jewellery seized, all in a single container shipped from China.
• Non-compliant sunglasses: 720 pairs with no CE mark and no mandatory information, another 579 carrying the mark but with no technical file and no EU declaration of conformity.

The European limits for costume jewellery imported from China

The thresholds sit in Annex XVII to the REACH regulation, Regulation (EC) 1907/2006. Entry 23 bans cadmium at or above 0.01% by weight in the metal parts of jewellery and costume jewellery: the limit is calculated on each metal part, surface coatings included, not on the weight of the whole object. Entry 63 sets lead at 0.05% by weight in the same articles. Entry 27 does not look at content but at release through the skin: 0.2 micrograms per square centimetre per week for items inserted into pierced parts of the body, 0.5 for those in direct and prolonged contact.

Set against the Genoa measurements, those thresholds show the size of the gap: the cadmium found stands to its own limit as 4,910 to 1, the lead as 99 to 1. These are ratios between two numbers, not an estimate of the risk to someone wearing a bracelet, which also depends on how much is released and for how long there is contact. They do make clear, though, that this is not a marginal overshoot.

Sunglasses are protective equipment

Under European law a pair of sunglasses is not a fashion accessory: it is category I personal protective equipment under Regulation (EU) 2016/425, because it protects the eyes from sunlight. Category I requires no involvement by a notified body, so for these products no certificate issued by a third party exists at all: it is the manufacturer who affixes the CE mark, draws up the EU declaration of conformity and keeps the technical file.

That is precisely why the documentation has to be requested. Conformity with the harmonised standard EN ISO 12312-1 creates a presumption that the health and safety requirements in Annex II to the regulation are met, but the presumption holds only if the evidence exists and somebody is holding it. Without a declaration, the CE mark printed on the temple is just lettering: the 579 pairs stopped in Genoa had the mark and nothing else.

What it means for importers

Whoever places a product on the European market answers for its conformity even when all they did was buy it: the seizure hits the Italian importer, not the Chinese supplier. And the bill is not only the value of the goods. It is that value plus the freight already paid, plus storage and destruction costs, plus the time needed to reorder, plus the attention that the same operator's next shipments will receive at customs.

The useful checkpoint comes earlier, and it turns into three concrete requests to the supplier. A test report on each metal part — not on the finished object, not sampled on the best-selling colour alone — covering cadmium, lead and nickel release. For eyewear and any other protective equipment, the EU declaration of conformity quoting the harmonised standard applied. And a written commitment to repeat the tests whenever the electroplated coating changes, given that the cadmium limit is calculated on surface layers too.

What a seizure does, and does not, tell you

One container stopped measures one container. It does not say how much non-compliant costume jewellery enters Europe, because customs checks are targeted rather than random, and it says nothing about the average quality of Chinese suppliers: it says that this lot, from this supplier, for this importer, was over the limits. The signal worth picking up concerns selection criteria instead, because the analyses covered metals the Union has restricted for years, in a product category customs laboratories have always watched. This was not an unforeseeable risk.

With La Merce a costume jewellery order in China starts with the test report on cadmium, lead and nickel release requested from the supplier before production, not once the container is already moored in Genoa.

Let's talk about your productprojectconceptgoalbrandproductprojectconceptgoalbrandproductprojectconceptgoalbrandproduct