Fragrance Allergies

Over the past 30 to 40 years there has been a political and societal trend to eliminate as much risk from peoples lives as possible, especially from consumer products. Allergies in general are on the increase but allergies towards fragrances are decreasing thanks to the work done by the industry to minimise the use of sensitizing materials.

The currently available data suggests that approximately 2% of the general population are affected in some way. The latest independent data from one of the world’s most respected expert dermatologists specialising in fragrance allergies (Prof Schnuch, IVDK) shows that in Europe between 1999 and 2007 sensitization to fragrance has halved (IVDK 2008).

Not all personal reactions or situations of some discomfort are true allergies.  People have a tendency to use that word in a general sense, when most correctly, it indicates the involvement of the body’s immune system.  So a person may have an irritation or a skin reaction or some “sensitivity” to a particular product, one of its ingredients or the conditions of use.  But that doesn’t mean the person “has an allergy.”  Usually, an allergic reaction is much more severe, lasts longer and involves more parts of the body than just where exposure occurs.  On the other hand, a skin rash that disappears when the product is no longer used could indicate only an irritant reaction, or a personal sensitivity.  This is much less severe.  Regardless, we hope that consumers can use products safely and try to avoid any type of reaction.

If someone does have a reaction to a product our advice is to contact a dermatologist. They will be able to help you identify the substance causing the problem. If they cannot easily identify the substance they can contact the manufacturer of the consumer product and they will be able to provide the Doctor with a list of ingredients. IFRA has a well established process for helping the dermatological community identify fragrance materials in consumer products. For full details click on the 'Working with Dermatologists' button on the left of this page.

The fragrance industry, through RIFM, has a testing program to determine, besides looking at other adverse effects, the dermal sensitization potential for fragrance ingredients.  Also, the industry has developed the dermal sensitization Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) approach to determine a safe level of use of fragrance ingredients in consumer products.   This approach follows fundamental properties of the risk assessment process. The industry is using the QRA approach to establish Standards restricting the use of fragrance ingredients with a known sensitization potential, and also has established Standards to ensure safe qualities of ingredients of concern.

As an organization, it gives us no pleasure to ban or restrict materials and we spend a great deal of time, effort and money to assess materials and indeed defend many of them. However, if the science clearly shows a material as being a sensitizer, we have to respond in the interests of consumer safety.
 
We do our best to keep the perfumer's palette as large as possible, but we also have to balance the needs of society and regulators.