Your home is the center of your family’s life, and fragrance can help make it special. At SC Johnson, we’ve spent more than 50 years working with fragrances and finding the very best ways to use them in your home. The perfect scent can boost your mood, energize your family, and even make your home seem cleaner.
Our Product-Specific Fragrance Disclosure
When you have questions about the products you use in your home, we want to help. In fact, we want to give you as much or more information than other companies do, so you can make the most informed choices for your family. That’s why in 2015, SC Johnson became the first major company to provide product-specific transparency about fragrance ingredients.
We now share more than 99.99% of the ingredients in most product formulas so you can easily find out what goes into each product.
Because we believe in fragrance transparency, SC Johnson had already been publishing our full list of approved fragrance ingredients for several years to push corporate transparency. But since fragrance suppliers consider their fragrance recipes to be confidential business information, it took some negotiating to get permission to share specific ingredient lists for individual products.
But we got there. We convinced our suppliers to allow us to share the vast majority of a product’s fragrance ingredients, with just a bit held back for confidentiality.
As a result, we’re now able to list all fragrance chemicals down to .01% of the total product formula. To put this in perspective, it’s like sharing all but 1 cent of a $100 bill.
Occasionally, the amount of fragrance in a total product is so small that even disclosing 99.99% of the total product formula doesn’t meet our standard for providing enough information. In those cases, we list the top 10 fragrance ingredients, provided there are at least 20 present.
We always try to select the method of disclosure that gives you the longest list and the most information. And we’re grateful to our suppliers for working with us to make product disclosure happen.
Our Fragrance Palette
Fragrances are both creative and complicated. Many companies develop their fragrances from a list of approximately 3,500 fragrance materials. You can click here to see the list published by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA), which shows fragrance ingredients used in consumer goods worldwide, all of which must be used so that the fragrance meets the IFRA Code of Practice and standards.
At SC Johnson, we take the review of fragrance ingredients a step further. We evaluate them not only under the IFRA standards, but also under our own standards that may look at ingredients differently. We start with the IFRA list and then apply our own internal requirements.
These may look at the same criteria as IFRA, such as carcinogicity, mutagenicity or reproductive toxicity, but at SC Johnson, we may take a different view of an ingredient. In some instances, we may also consider additional factors such as consumer confidence with ingredients or other scientific viewpoints.
The end result is SC Johnson's Fragrance Palette, which meets both the IFRA standards and our own - and as a result is smaller and more exclusive than the IFRA list. We’ve excluded approximately 2,000 potential ingredients from our fragrance ingredients palette. Explore our full Fragrance Palette here.
It is important to realize that our analysis of ingredients is an ongoing process. If new scientific information emerges, we will evaluate it, and where appropriate make changes to our fragrance palette.
Product and Safety Expertise
In addition to our own decades of fragrance expertise, SC Johnson is a member of the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM), which has the most comprehensive database worldwide of safety evaluations for fragrance materials. It's an industry organization, and it uses an independent expert panel. Industry safety standards are maintained by IFRA, using data from RIFM.
We require our fragrance suppliers to abide by IFRA's Code of Practice and its standards, which take into account numerous factors including chemical composition, variety of use, volume of use, usage concentration and more. The IFRA standards currently restrict the use of more than 170 substances due to their chemical profile.