Botanical Extract SDS: Solvent, Carrier, and Actives

Pull up the SDS for a green tea extract or a calendula extract sometime and you'll notice something odd: the plant itself is barely mentioned. Section 3, composition, is dominated by whatever the plant material was extracted into, which is usually water, glycerin, propylene glycol, or a bit of ethanol. That carrier is doing more work in your compliance filing than the "extract" name on the label implies.

Why the carrier shows up first

Botanical extraction almost never produces a pure isolated compound at the small-batch level. A supplier soaks plant material in a solvent, water, glycerin, or an alcohol blend, filters it, and sells you the resulting liquid as "Calendula Officinalis Flower Extract." The INCI name refers to the whole extract as sold, but the actual bioactive plant compounds might make up a small fraction of that liquid, with the rest being the carrier that pulled them out of the plant material in the first place.

This is exactly why an SDS lists things like Glycerin or Aqua prominently in section 3 even for a product marketed as a botanical extract. The carrier isn't a filler being hidden from you. It's structurally necessary to the extraction process, and it's also the majority of what's in the bottle.

What this means for your actual concentration

If your formula calls for calendula extract at 2%, and the supplier's extract itself is, say, mostly glycerin with a smaller fraction of actual calendula-derived compounds, you need to think about two different percentages:

• The 2% is how much of the extract liquid you're adding to your formula.
• Within that 2%, only a portion is the botanical material itself, and the rest is carrier.

Whether that distinction changes your compliance picture depends on what you're checking. For the finished-product INCI list on your CNF, you generally list "Calendula Officinalis Flower Extract" as its own line at the 2% you used, since that's how the ingredient is understood and sold. But if you're trying to figure out how much of a specific compound (say, an essential oil constituent that carried over from the extraction, or a preservative the supplier added to stabilize the extract) is really in your finished product, you multiply through the same way you would with any supplier blend: take the component's percentage inside the extract and multiply it by your use level.

CAS numbers get complicated fast

Some botanical extracts have a CAS number covering the whole extract as a substance. Others don't, because "Calendula Officinalis Flower Extract" describes a natural, variable mixture rather than a single defined chemical, and CAS numbers are built for defined substances. Where a CAS number does exist for an extract, it typically doesn't tell you the internal carrier breakdown, so you still need the SDS or a supplier data sheet for that detail.

SDS element	What it usually tells you	What it doesn't tell you
Section 3, composition	Carrier solvent, sometimes a preservative	Precise active compound percentage
Product name	The INCI name of the extract as sold	The actual botanical potency
CAS number (if present)	An identifier for the extract or a specific isolated compound	The batch-to-batch variability of a natural material
Supplier data sheet (separate from SDS)	Sometimes has extraction ratio (e.g., 1:10)	Not always available on request

What to actually ask your extract supplier

Ask for the extraction ratio, something like "1:1" or "1:10," which tells you how much plant material went into how much finished extract. Ask whether the carrier is water, glycerin, propylene glycol, or something else, since that affects both your product's water content for preservative purposes and any restricted-substance checks on the carrier itself. And if the extract includes a preservative to keep it shelf-stable in the drum, get that ingredient and its percentage too, because it belongs on your CNF as its own line, carried through at its true finished-product concentration.

Cosmetic Comply expands supplier blends and extract carriers into their components automatically, so a calendula extract's glycerin carrier or preservative gets carried through to its real percentage in your finished product rather than getting missed because it was buried in an SDS you'd need a chemistry background to fully parse.