Fifteen of Our Products Declare Fragrance. Eight More Say 'Fragrance-Free' and Aren't.

Type "fragrance-free" into our own store and thirty-two products come back. We read all fifty-four ingredient lists again this week to check that number, one row at a time, because a claim like that is easy to type and hard to earn.

Eight of the thirty-two contain something we ourselves graded as a fragrance material.

Not a trace, not a contaminant. An ingredient sitting on the label with a risk grade next to it, written by us, in a product whose marketing copy says the opposite. One of the eight is a face wash with "Tea Tree" printed in its name.

We said twelve. It is fifteen.

The recount was the easy part. Working out why we had been wrong took longer than reading all fifty-four lists.

Fifteen products carry a generic fragrance declaration. The number in our planning notes was twelve, and the three we missed were missed because the string is not written the same way twice. Our catalogue uses "Fragrance", "Fragrance (Parfum)" and "Fragrance (Parfum Blend)" as three separate entries, and the GDS hair dye shampoo files its under a function label nothing else in the database uses. A filter searching for one of those strings finds two thirds of the truth.

This is the second time in five days. Last week we found salicylic acid in ten products after telling ourselves it was nine, for the same reason: a hand-typed field with no controlled vocabulary behind it. Two miscounts, one cause.

Two of the fifteen are graded high risk, both hair products: the Deepeer perfume repair hair pack and the AgainMe scalp shampoo. The other thirteen are mid. And in five of the fifteen, fragrance is the very last ingredient on the list, which under the labelling rules means it sits somewhere at or below one percent along with everything else down there.

What the word "fragrance" is allowed to cover

The FDA is unusually direct about this. Its page on fragrances in cosmetics states that "in most cases, each ingredient must be listed individually," but that "under U.S. regulations, fragrance and flavor ingredients can be listed simply as 'Fragrance' or 'Flavor.'" The reason given is that the labelling law "is not allowed to be used to force a company to tell 'trade secrets.'" So one word can stand in for a mixture of dozens of materials, and the regulation that permits it, 21 CFR 701.3, also lets everything present at one percent or less be listed in any order at all.

The same FDA page carries a sentence worth reading twice: "Even some products labeled 'unscented' may contain fragrance ingredients," because a maker may add just enough scent to cover the smell of everything else. We took apart the difference between that word and "fragrance-free" when we graded label claims by legal force, and put both in the bottom tier.

What actually restricts fragrance materials is not a government at all in most of the world. It is the International Fragrance Association, whose Standards come in three forms: a prohibition, which bans a material; a restriction, which caps how much can be used in which kind of product; and a specification, which sets purity conditions. The 51st Amendment was notified on 30 June 2023, and IFRA says amendments arrive on a roughly three-year cycle. It is a trade body regulating its own members, and it is also the most detailed instrument that exists.

We tried to pin down the Korean position and failed. The MFDS notification on labelling fragrance allergens would not load for us, on either the ministry site or the national law portal, which is the second time this month a Korean primary source has beaten us. We are not going to state Korea's requirement from a secondary summary.

Eight products that say fragrance-free and are not

The Reve:am row is the one that should not have survived any review. Our own database gives that ingredient the function "Fragrant Botanical", in those words, on a product whose label claim is fragrance-free. Nobody had to interpret anything. The two fields contradict each other in plain text.

The Seapuri mist and the Foellie perfume are worse in a different way, because both make the stronger claim. "Allergen-free" on a body mist holding five mid-graded aromatic rows is not a stretch of a definition; it is the wrong word. And the Foellie claim borrows its authority from a third-party app rather than from anything we checked ourselves, which is a habit we should not have.

Two products in the catalogue write the claim correctly. The Cloropy bath fizz says "synthetic-fragrance-free" and carries lavender oil. The 8Grow hair tonic says "no added synthetic fragrance" and carries rosemary leaf oil. Both statements are true as written, and both took an extra word to get right.

Tea tree oil is not a neutral botanical

Three of the eight contain tea tree leaf oil, and one of them has it in the product name.

The EU's Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety adopted an opinion on tea tree oil on 30 October 2025. Its conclusion is one sentence long: "Based on the data provided, TTO is a moderate skin sensitiser." The committee set maximum concentrations it considers safe for dermally applied adult products, and they are not generous: 2.0% in shampoo, 1.0% in shower gel, 1.0% in face wash, and 0.1% in face cream. It also noted that the composition of the oil changes with exposure to light, heat, air and moisture, and that the applicant supplied no stability data.

We do not know how much tea tree oil is in any of our three. Position on the list gives a ceiling and nothing better: tenth of fifty-one, sixteenth of thirty-three, twenty-fourth of forty-one. All three are rinse-off or near enough, which is the more forgiving side of the SCCS table. None of that makes the label claim true.

A correction we owe from last week

On 10 August we published a piece listing the eight ingredients in our catalogue that got our worst grade. At the end of it we recommended the Dr.Bio Eco Moisture Cream as a clean alternative and described it as having no fragrance at all.

That was wrong. The cream contains rosemary leaf extract. Behind it sit rose flower water and iris florentina root extract, and the product's own claim list says "essential-oil-free" rather than fragrance-free. Every one of those rows is graded low by our screen, so the product is not dangerous and its 9.8 stands. The sentence we wrote about it was still not accurate, and we are not going to quietly edit it.

We are also not the outlier we would like to be. A 2017 analysis in JAMA Dermatology pulled the 174 best-selling moisturisers across three American retailers, covering 109,713 reviews, and found that only 12% were free of allergens on the North American Contact Dermatitis Group list. The single most common allergen across those products was fragrance mix, in 87 of them. And of the products claiming to be fragrance-free, 45% held at least one fragrance cross-reactor or botanical ingredient.

Eight out of thirty-two is 25%. We are doing better than the American bestseller shelf and worse than our own copy says.

What our screening found

The practical takeaway

If fragrance is the thing you react to, the claim on the front is the last place to look. Read the bottom third of the ingredient list, where anything under one percent is allowed to sit in any order, and read it for two kinds of word: the plain fragrance declaration, and any Latin binomial ending in Oil or Extract.

That last category is where the claims break, in our catalogue and in the JAMA sample. Nobody is hiding tea tree oil. It is printed on the label, in the product name sometimes, and it still coexists with the words fragrance-free because no rule anywhere says a botanical oil counts as fragrance.

The twelve products of ours that pass all three tests are on the awards page, along with the screen that found the other eight.