Breaking a Preservative Blend Into Its INCI Components

You buy "Optiphen" from your supplier, it shows up as one line on their spec sheet, and you assume it goes on your filing as one ingredient. It doesn't. Preservative blends are almost always a mix of two or three distinct compounds sold under a single trade name, and your notification needs each one listed separately by INCI name.

Why trade names never make it onto the filing

Trade names like Optiphen, Euxyl PE 9010, or Geogard Ultra are commercial products, not chemical identities. They exist so suppliers can sell a convenient, pre-blended, often synergistic combination of preservative ingredients under one memorable name. But a regulatory filing works at the level of actual chemical substances, identified by INCI name, and where applicable, CAS number. That means every trade-named blend has to be decomposed into what it's actually made of before it goes anywhere near a filing.

This is true whether you're filing a CNF in Canada, working through MoCRA product listing in the US, or building a Product Information File for the EU. The specific form differs by market, but the underlying principle, ingredients get identified by INCI name, is consistent across all of them.

A concrete example

Take a commonly used blend like Optiphen. Marketed as a single "paraben-free preservative," it's typically a combination of phenoxyethanol and caprylyl glycol. On a supplier spec sheet, you might see it as one product. On your filing, it becomes two separate INCI entries:

Trade name	INCI components	Typical function
Optiphen (example composition)	Phenoxyethanol	Preservative
Optiphen (example composition)	Caprylyl Glycol	Preservative, skin conditioning

Euxyl PE 9010, another widely used blend, is commonly a combination of phenoxyethanol and ethylhexylglycerin, which similarly expands into two INCI entries rather than one.

The exact composition of any given trade-named blend can vary by supplier and by formulation version, so treat any example composition as illustrative, not a substitute for your actual supplier's current documentation.

Where the real concentration math comes in

Expanding the blend into INCI components is only half the job. The other half is carrying the percentages through correctly. If your supplier's blend is used in your formula at 1%, and the blend itself is documented as, say, 90% phenoxyethanol and 10% caprylyl glycol by composition, then the real concentration of each component in your finished product is:

• Phenoxyethanol: 1% use level times 90% component share equals 0.9% in the finished product
• Caprylyl Glycol: 1% use level times 10% component share equals 0.1% in the finished product

This matters because concentration limits and restricted substance thresholds apply to the actual component, not to the blend as a whole. Phenoxyethanol in particular is a preservative worth checking against your target market's restricted substances list, since limit values do exist for it in various frameworks, and you want to be checking the real finished-product concentration, not the blend's use level.

Where to get the actual composition data

Don't guess at a blend's internal composition from a generic description online. Get the supplier's actual technical data sheet or safety data sheet for the specific blend you're using. Remember that a safety data sheet has 16 standard sections, and section 3 is specifically where composition information lives, including the INCI names and percentage ranges of each component. That's your authoritative source, not a trade name search that turns up someone else's guess at the formula.

A quick process to follow for every blend ingredient

1. Pull the SDS or technical data sheet for the specific trade-named product.
2. Find section 3 (composition) and note each INCI component and its percentage range within the blend.
3. Multiply each component's percentage by your formula's use level of the blend to get the real finished-product concentration.
4. List each component separately on your filing by INCI name, with its calculated concentration or concentration range.
5. Check each component individually against your target market's restricted and prohibited substances list.

Skipping this expansion is one of the more common ways a filing ends up inaccurate without the maker realizing it, because the trade name looks complete on its own. It isn't.

This exact expansion, taking a supplier blend and carrying its components and real percentages through to a finished filing, is core to how Cosmetic Comply processes an ingredient list. It does the multiplication and the INCI and CAS mapping automatically, then screens each resulting component against the restricted list before a human reviewer checks the result.