Which Allergens End Up on a Body Lotion Label

Say you've got a body lotion at 1% total fragrance load, using a lavender-and-citrus blend you bought from a supplier. You know fragrance allergens need disclosure in Canada now, but "1% fragrance" does not tell you what actually needs to land on the label. What matters is what's inside that 1%, and at what real concentration each piece lands in the finished lotion. Let's walk through it.

Start with the blend's composition, not the label claim

Your supplier's fragrance blend is not a single substance, it is a mixture, and its technical data sheet or IFRA certificate should break down what's in it and at what percentage. Say your blend contains 4% Linalool and 3% Limonene by weight of the blend itself, both of which occur naturally in citrus and lavender oils and are also two of the most common named fragrance allergens.

To find the real concentration in your lotion, you multiply the component percentage by your use level:

• Linalool: 4% of the blend x 1% use level = 0.04% in the finished lotion
• Limonene: 3% of the blend x 1% use level = 0.03% in the finished lotion

Both numbers look small. Whether they trigger disclosure depends entirely on the threshold for your product type.

Leave-on threshold is much lower than rinse-off

Body lotion sits on skin, it is not rinsed off, so it falls under the leave-on disclosure threshold: above 0.001%, which is 10 ppm. Compare that to rinse-off products like shampoo or body wash, where the threshold is above 0.01%, or 100 ppm, ten times higher.

At 0.04% and 0.03%, both Linalool and Limonene in our example lotion are well above the 10 ppm leave-on threshold. Both need to be named on the label. If this same fragrance blend and use level were going into a rinse-off body wash instead, the math would still clear the rinse-off threshold too in this case, since 0.04% and 0.03% both exceed 0.01%. But it is easy to imagine a lower-dose scenario where a rinse-off product stays under 0.01% while the identical blend in a leave-on lotion would not. The product category changes the answer, not just the ingredient.

Common allergens that show up in natural fragrance blends

A handful of names account for most of what you will encounter when you're working with essential-oil-based fragrance:

Allergen	Commonly found in
Limonene	Citrus oils (orange, lemon, bergamot)
Linalool	Lavender, bergamot, many florals
Citronellol	Rose, geranium, citronella
Geraniol	Rose, geranium, palmarosa
Eugenol	Clove, cinnamon, some rose varieties
Coumarin	Tonka bean, some lavender chemotypes

If your lotion uses a blend built on lavender and orange, expect at least Linalool and Limonene to be in the mix and worth checking. Add rose or geranium and you're likely also looking at Citronellol and Geraniol.

Timing matters as much as the math

Canada is phasing this in over two stages. List 1, the original allergen set, becomes mandatory on the CNF and the label on April 12, 2026. List 2, an expanded set aligned with international lists, becomes mandatory August 1, 2026. If you're formulating now, it is worth checking your fragrance components against both lists rather than just the one that is mandatory first, so you are not reformulating your label twice in one year.

Getting the arithmetic right, every time

The failure mode here is rarely misunderstanding the concept. It is getting the multiplication wrong on one component out of six in a blend, or forgetting that a "natural essential oil" is itself a mixture of allergenic constituents rather than a single clean ingredient. This is the exact kind of calculation Cosmetic Comply automates: it takes your ingredient list, expands supplier blends into their real components, carries the percentages through to the finished product, and flags which allergens cross the leave-on or rinse-off threshold for your specific product type. Worth running the check either way, since a missed allergen is a label reprint you don't want after the fact.