Fragrance Loophole vacation episode 186

Perry Romanowski (0:00)

Hi, I'm Perry, and you're listening to a special edition of The Beauty Brains.

Hello and welcome to The Beauty Brains, a show where real scientists answer your beauty questions and give you an insider's look into the beauty product industry. I'm your host, Perry Romanowski, and you know what? I'm on vacation. And you know who else is on vacation? My co-host. Hey, Valerie.

Valerie (0:32)

Hi, Perry.

Perry Romanowski (0:34)

So, both of you and I are not here, are we?

Valerie (0:37)

No, that's why we're coming to you guys with a little special edition of The Brains today.

Perry Romanowski (0:42)

Yeah, I thought instead of taking a whole week off, instead we would just give our thoughts about a topic that we both find interesting. And today's topic is going to be cosmetic fragrances. All right, Valerie, have you ever seen that documentary that's on Netflix called...

God, what is it called?

Valerie (1:06)

It's called Stink. It's just called Stink. That's right, it's Stink.

I know you and I have talked about this before, Perry. I don't know if we've talked about it on The Beauty Brains, but I felt like that documentary was really one-sided. I tried to give it a chance.

Perry Romanowski (1:23)

Yeah, I mostly just felt sorry for the guy because he's clearly driven by something that happened in his family, and he just wanted answers, and he was having a hard time getting answers from corporations specifically about fragrance, and now he's got a bug about his fragrance. And I understand, but the problem is that he starts with the conclusion that corporations are evil and they want to kill people, and he collects all the information that supports that idea. So one of the things I wanted to do is go through some of the claims that are made in that documentary about fragrances and talk about it. And specifically, there's a thing called the Fragrance Loophole. Are you familiar with the Fragrance Loophole?

Valerie (2:15)

I am, but I'm not sure our audience is.

Perry Romanowski (2:18)

A common claim that I see about cosmetics and that comes up in this documentary is that there is a Fragrance Loophole that allows cosmetic companies to fill their formulas with toxic chemicals without listing them. The idea is that if something is part of a fragrance, it is secret and it can't be listed on the label. You can simply put Fragrance or Parfum if you happen to be a French speaking country.

And while this claim is technically true, I'm going to explain to you why I think it's misleading, and it's misleading in a bunch of different ways. First, it's not true that all of the ingredients of the fragrance are not listed, especially in Europe. Some of the fragrance ingredients are actually listed. In the EU, there is a list of 26 ingredients in fragrances that are known allergens. And it's a requirement that companies list out any of these ingredients that might be in their fragrances. It's got to be listed on their labels. So the ingredients that represent the biggest risk to consumers are specifically listed out on ingredient labels.

Now, this is not a strict requirement in the US. However, all of the biggest cosmetic companies are going to do this just as a matter of course. Smaller US companies often ignore this step, which is why I think people who are sensitive to fragrance ingredients should really stick to purchasing products from the big companies.

Valerie (3:40)

My challenge with the fragrance loophole is that people are using plant extracts and other items that still contain allergens because they have some intrinsic fragrance value. And by saying, oh, I'm just going to use this plant extract that happens to smell like blueberries in my product doesn't mean that the product is any safer than a fragrance because at the end of the day, these molecules that have an aroma have a certain chemical structure, and that's what makes them fragrances. And yeah, some of those are allergens. And you're really not doing people who have a true sensitivity to these allergens a service because in a way, it's a little bit deceitful just to get a fragrance-free claim, but then you still want your product to have an odor.

Perry Romanowski (4:30)

The other interesting thing about that is if you look at the ingredients that are most dangerous or most allergen causing, those are actually natural ingredients. They're naturally derived. They're not the synthetic ingredients.

You see, people evolve along with plants, and plants evolved protection mechanisms to have an interaction with humans if they want the humans to avoid picking the plants. That's how you get things like poison ivy. And so a lot of the most allergen causing ingredients are actually natural ingredients.