Lavender Oil (Lavandula Angustifolia) and Its Fragrance Allergens

Lavender is one of the first oils anyone learns in soap and skincare making, and it's also one of the clearer examples of why "essential oil" and "no allergen concerns" aren't the same thing. It smells calm and traditional, but chemically it's mostly two allergen-relevant compounds sitting at fairly high concentrations.

The basics: INCI and CAS

The INCI name is Lavandula Angustifolia (Lavender) Oil, sometimes labeled with the flower/leaf/stem designation depending on the extraction. It's worth noting that essential oils frequently have more than one CAS number associated with them because the same botanical source can be registered slightly differently by different bodies, or the oil versus its extract get separate entries. Always confirm the CAS your supplier is actually citing on their documentation rather than assuming a single universal number applies.

Detail	Value
INCI name	Lavandula Angustifolia (Lavender) Oil
CAS number	Varies by registration; confirm with supplier COA (commonly cited as 8000-28-0 for true lavender oil)
Typical function	Fragrance, skin-conditioning
Key allergens	Linalool, linalyl acetate, geraniol (minor)

What's actually in the bottle

True lavender oil (Lavandula angustifolia, sometimes called Lavandula officinalis) is dominated by two compounds:

• Linalool, often somewhere in the range of 25 to 45 percent depending on growing region, altitude, and harvest timing.
• Linalyl acetate, frequently in a similar range, and the two together commonly make up the bulk of the oil.

Both of these are recognized fragrance allergens. Smaller amounts of other allergens like geraniol may also be present, but linalool and linalyl acetate are the ones you need to be watching closely for any lavender-containing product.

This is worth sitting with for a second: a "calming, gentle" oil that's a staple of natural skincare is, chemically, mostly composed of two of the most common fragrance allergens on the list. That's not a reason to avoid lavender. It's a reason to be precise about labeling it.

Doing the concentration math

If your formula uses lavender oil at 1%, and your supplier's certificate of analysis shows 35% linalool and 30% linalyl acetate, here's what that translates to in the finished product:

• Linalool: 35% of 1% = 0.35%, or 3,500 ppm
• Linalyl acetate: 30% of 1% = 0.30%, or 3,000 ppm

Both numbers are enormously above the Canadian disclosure thresholds, which sit at above 0.001% (10 ppm) for leave-on products and above 0.01% (100 ppm) for rinse-off products. Even a modest 0.1% use rate of lavender oil in a rinse-off soap will typically push linalool past the rinse-off threshold. There's basically no realistic use level where lavender oil in a formula won't require allergen disclosure once the mandatory lists apply.

Why the two numbers on the COA matter

A lot of makers buy lavender oil and note "linalool present" without pulling the actual percentages from their supplier's documentation. That's a mistake for two reasons. First, linalool content genuinely varies by source, French lavender grown at altitude tends to run differently than lavender grown elsewhere, so a generic percentage from a textbook isn't reliable for your specific batch. Second, you need both linalool and linalyl acetate numbers, not just one, since both are separately disclosable allergens and both tend to sit at meaningful concentrations.

Ask your supplier for a batch-specific certificate of analysis, not a generic spec sheet, if you can get one. It'll save you from either overstating or understating your allergen disclosure.

Timeline for Canada

The fragrance allergen disclosure rules are landing in two stages. List 1, the original fragrance allergen set, which includes linalool, becomes mandatory on both the Cosmetic Notification Form and the product label on April 12, 2026. List 2, an expanded set aligned with international allergen lists, becomes mandatory August 1, 2026. If you sell lavender-scented products in Canada, both linalool and linalyl acetate are squarely within scope, so this isn't a distant compliance item, it's close enough to plan for now rather than later.

A practical note for formulators

If you're using lavender oil alongside other allergen-heavy naturals like rose or bergamot, the individual contributions of linalool from each oil add up. A formula with 0.5% lavender and 0.3% bergamot might both be contributing linalool, and the disclosure threshold applies to the total linalool in the finished product, not to each oil's contribution counted separately. That kind of cross-ingredient tallying is easy to miss doing by hand across a full formula.

That's the sort of check Cosmetic Comply runs automatically when you submit an ingredient list. It matches each oil to its INCI, expands it against known allergen content, and totals allergen concentrations across the whole formula rather than ingredient by ingredient, which is where these calculations usually go wrong when done manually.