What to Do When Your SDS Lists No Percentages at All

You open Section 3, expecting a nice clean list of ingredients with percentages next to each one, and instead you get names with no numbers at all, or worse, a note that just says "proprietary blend." This happens more than makers expect, and it's frustrating precisely because you know the information exists somewhere, the supplier just hasn't put it on the document you have.

Why this happens legitimately

SDS documents are safety documents first, not compositional disclosure documents. A supplier can legally satisfy the hazard communication purpose of an SDS without disclosing exact percentages, particularly for proprietary blends where the specific ratio is considered a trade secret. This is common with fragrance blends, some preservative systems, and certain botanical extract concentrates. The supplier isn't necessarily hiding anything nefarious. They're protecting a formulation they don't want copied, which is a legitimate business concern on their end, even though it creates a real headache on yours.

Sometimes it's simpler than that: the SDS was written to a minimum compliance standard and nobody at the supplier bothered to add percentage ranges because it wasn't strictly required for the hazard communication purpose the document serves.

Your options, roughly in order of effort

Ask the supplier directly for a concentration range. This is the first and easiest move, and it works more often than people expect. Many suppliers will provide a confidential percentage range, even if not an exact figure, if you ask specifically and explain you need it for a regulatory filing rather than idle curiosity. A range is usually enough, since notification systems often accept concentration ranges rather than requiring one exact number.

Ask for a Certificate of Analysis (CoA) or a Confidential Business Information sheet. Some suppliers have a separate document, sometimes gated behind a signed non-disclosure agreement, that provides fuller compositional detail than the public SDS. This is standard practice in the industry and not an unusual request.

Check if the product is a recognized supplier blend with published composition. Some commercial blends, certain preservative systems in particular, have their component breakdown published in industry references or by the manufacturer's technical data sheet, separate from the SDS. A technical data sheet (TDS) is a different document from an SDS and sometimes contains the composition detail the SDS omits.

Use the maximum plausible concentration as a conservative placeholder, and label it as such internally. If you genuinely cannot get a number from the supplier, and the ingredient in question isn't close to a restricted threshold, you may need to work with your own use rate of the blend as the ceiling, understanding that the individual components inside it are undetermined. This is a stopgap, not a real answer, and it should push you to keep asking the supplier rather than settling here permanently.

Escalate if the ingredient matters for a threshold decision. If the missing percentage happens to be for a component that could plausibly cross a restricted or allergen threshold, this stops being a nice-to-have and becomes something you need before you can responsibly file. Don't guess your way past a real threshold question.

A short list of what to actually request from a supplier

When you reach out, be specific. A vague "can you send more info" email gets a vague reply. Ask for:

• Full INCI names of every component in the blend, not just the trade name
• CAS numbers where applicable, since some components share INCI names but differ by CAS
• A percentage or percentage range for each component
• Any allergen declaration if the blend is fragrance-related, since this feeds directly into threshold calculations

What not to do

Don't invent a percentage because it's convenient, and don't assume the missing component is a trace amount just because it wasn't disclosed. Trade secret protection often specifically hides ingredients used at meaningful, functional concentrations, not just trace additives. The whole point of protecting a blend's composition is usually that the ratio is the valuable part.

Where this fits into a bigger workflow

Missing supplier data is one of the most common bottlenecks in getting a formula filing-ready, and it's exactly the kind of gap that's easy to lose track of across a busy product line. Cosmetic Comply flags ingredients with incomplete concentration data as you build out your formula, so you know exactly which supplier conversations you still need to have before submission, rather than discovering the gap at the worst possible moment.