Getting Allergen Percentages From a Supplier Fragrance Doc

Your fragrance supplier sent over a certificate with a list of named allergen components and percentages, and it looks intimidating in a spreadsheet-with-footnotes kind of way. The good news is that once you know what you're looking for, it's one of the more mechanical parts of getting a formula ready to file. The bad news is that skipping it, or misreading it, is exactly how allergen disclosure gets missed.

What the document usually contains

A supplier's fragrance allergen documentation typically lists named allergenic constituents present in that specific fragrance oil or essential oil blend, each as a percentage of the fragrance itself. Common names you'll see include Limonene, Linalool, Citronellol, Geraniol, Eugenol, and Coumarin, since these occur naturally in a huge range of essential oils and fragrance compounds, not just synthetic ones. Don't assume "natural" or "essential oil" means allergen-free. A lavender essential oil, for instance, can carry meaningful Linalool and Linalyl Acetate content on its own.

The document should give you a percentage for each named allergen within the fragrance or essential oil as sold, not within your finished product. That distinction is the whole ballgame for the next step.

The math you actually need to do

Take the allergen percentage from the supplier document and multiply it by the percentage of that fragrance or essential oil in your finished formula. That gives you the real concentration of each named allergen in the product a customer actually uses.

For example, if your fragrance oil documentation says it contains 3% Linalool, and you're using that fragrance at 1% in your lotion, the actual Linalool concentration in the finished lotion is:

3% x 1% = 0.03%, or 300 ppm

Where the disclosure lines sit

Once you have that real, finished-product concentration, compare it against the relevant threshold:

Product type	Disclosure threshold
Leave-on products	Above 0.001% (10 ppm)
Rinse-off products	Above 0.01% (100 ppm)

In the Linalool example above, 300 ppm clears both thresholds easily, whether it's a leave-on lotion or a rinse-off wash, so that allergen would need to be named.

Common mistakes when reading these documents

• Confusing the fragrance's internal percentage with the finished product's percentage. These are two different numbers, and only the second one matters for disclosure.
• Assuming a low use-rate fragrance is automatically safe. Some fragrance oils carry very high concentrations of a given allergen, so even a small use rate in your formula can clear the threshold.
• Ignoring essential oils because they don't come with a formal "fragrance allergen certificate." Essential oils still contain these naturally occurring constituents, and many suppliers of essential oils can provide a GC/MS report or composition breakdown on request, which serves the same purpose.
• Losing track of multiple fragrance sources in one product. If you use two different scented ingredients, say a fragrance oil and a separate essential oil for a "boost," you need to add the contribution from both sources together before comparing to the threshold.

Timing matters in Canada right now

In Canada, this isn't just good practice, it's becoming a firm requirement on a schedule. List 1 fragrance allergens become mandatory on the Cosmetic Notification Form and on the label starting April 12, 2026, and List 2, an expanded set aligned with international lists, becomes mandatory August 1, 2026. If you're formulating now, doing this math today rather than waiting until closer to those dates gives you room to reformulate if something comes in higher than expected.

Making this less painful

Ask suppliers for allergen documentation before you commit to a fragrance, not after you've built three products around it. If a supplier can't produce this data at all, treat that as a real gap, not a minor inconvenience, since you can't disclose what you can't calculate.

Cosmetic Comply's ingredient screening takes your fragrance use rate and the supplier's declared allergen percentages and does this multiplication automatically, flagging anything that clears the leave-on or rinse-off threshold before it becomes a surprise during filing.