How to List Fragrance and Parfum on a Cosmetic Label

For years, "Parfum" on an ingredient list has functioned like a locked box. Everyone knew there was a fragrance formula in there, nobody outside the supplier had to say what, and that was fine. It's not staying fine. Canada's allergen disclosure rules are prying that box open, one allergen at a time.

Why "Parfum" exists as a grouping term

Fragrance formulas are often proprietary blends of dozens of aromatic compounds, and INCI convention has long allowed suppliers to list the whole blend under a single term, "Parfum" or "Fragrance," rather than disclosing every individual component. This protects genuinely proprietary formulation work, and it's why you'll see "Parfum" sitting near the end of an ingredient list on products whose scents are wildly different from each other.

The tradeoff has always been that consumers with fragrance sensitivities or allergies had no way to know, from the label alone, which specific aromatic compounds were present.

What's changing in Canada

Canada's fragrance allergen disclosure rules break open part of that grouping. There are two sets of allergens with two different mandatory dates:

• List 1, the original fragrance allergen set, becomes mandatory on the CNF and the label on April 12, 2026.
• List 2, an expanded set aligned with international allergen lists, becomes mandatory on August 1, 2026.

The trigger for disclosure depends on concentration and product type: above 0.001% (10 ppm) in leave-on products, and above 0.01% (100 ppm) in rinse-off products. Below those thresholds, an allergen can still sit inside the "Parfum" grouping without individual disclosure. Above them, it has to be named individually on both the CNF and the label.

Common allergens on these lists include Limonene, Linalool, Citronellol, Geraniol, Eugenol, and Coumarin, and all of them occur naturally in a wide range of essential oils, which is exactly why this affects natural and "clean" formulations just as much as synthetic fragrance blends.

What your label actually looks like going forward

Practically, your ingredient list starts doing double duty. You'll still have "Parfum" grouping the bulk of a proprietary fragrance blend, but sitting next to it, listed individually by INCI name, will be whichever allergens from List 1 (and later List 2) cross the disclosure threshold for your specific product.

A simplified example of what that looks like on a leave-on lotion using a lavender-heavy fragrance blend:

Ingredient (INCI)	Listed how	Why
Aqua	Individual	Base ingredient, not fragrance-related
Parfum	Grouped	Proprietary blend, non-allergen components
Linalool	Individual	Allergen above 10 ppm leave-on threshold
Limonene	Individual	Allergen above 10 ppm leave-on threshold
Citronellol	Grouped within Parfum	Present, but below disclosure threshold

Notice that not every allergen in the blend necessarily gets pulled out. Only the ones that cross the concentration threshold for your product type do. That means the same essential oil blend might require different disclosure on a leave-on face cream versus a rinse-off body wash, because the thresholds differ by product category.

The step most people skip: knowing what's actually in your blend

This is where a lot of makers using pre-made fragrance oils get stuck. If your supplier sold you a fragrance blend without a full component breakdown, you can't determine which allergens are present or at what concentration, and you can't accurately fill out either threshold check. Get a full ingredient disclosure from your fragrance supplier, not just a safety data sheet summary, before you assume your blend is clean of listed allergens.

Remember too that supplier blends need to be expanded mathematically: multiply the allergen's percentage within the blend by the blend's use level in your finished product to get the real concentration you're checking against the threshold. A fragrance oil used at 1% in your lotion, containing 2% linalool within the blend itself, works out to 0.02% linalool in the finished product, which is well above the 10 ppm leave-on trigger.

Getting ahead of the two deadlines

If you're formulating anything with essential oils or fragrance oils sold into Canada, don't wait until April 2026 to figure out your List 1 exposure, and don't assume you have all of 2026 before List 2 matters either, since August isn't far behind April. Run your fragrance components against both lists now, while you still have time to reformulate if something turns out to be a labeling headache.

Cosmetic Comply's ingredient mapping handles exactly this kind of component-level breakdown, expanding supplier blends into their individual INCI entries and carrying the real concentrations through, which is precisely the groundwork you need before either allergen list deadline arrives.