The fragrance allergen labelling deadline was 31 July 2026. It has passed. Here is what that means for your product.

The two dates, and where we are between them

Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 of 26 July 2023 amends Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009 as regards the labelling of fragrance allergens in cosmetic products (OJ L 188, 27.7.2023, p. 1). Its Annex carries transitional footnotes, and they are not all worded the same. Footnote (*1) reads:

Cosmetic products containing that substance that do not comply with the restrictions may be placed on the Union market until 31 July 2026 and made available on the Union market until 31 July 2028.

Check which footnote is attached to the entry for your substance before you rely on it — footnote (*2), for one, grants the same two dates only to products that comply with the restrictions applicable on 15 August 2023.

Two dates. One has gone. One has not.

Those are not two ways of saying the same thing. The Regulation defines them separately. Making available on the market is any supply of a cosmetic product for distribution, consumption or use on the Community market in the course of a commercial activity, whether in return for payment or free of charge (Art. 2(1)(g), Reg. (EC) 1223/2009). Placing on the market is a cosmetic product's first making available on the Community market (Art. 2(1)(h), Reg. (EC) 1223/2009). The Regulation says "Community"; read it as the Union.

So the practical position on 20 September 2026 is:

• Stock you placed on the Union market on or before 31 July 2026 may continue to be made available — sold on, distributed, sold through — until 31 July 2028.
• Anything you place on the Union market from 1 August 2026 onward has to carry the new labelling. There is no run-in left for new product. That window closed on 31 July 2026.

If you have been reading pages that describe this as a countdown, they were written before the summer and have not been revisited since. That is the ordinary condition of regulatory content on the internet, and it is why we publish a dated feed instead of an article.

What the amendment actually changed

Annex III of Regulation (EC) 1223/2009 is the list of substances that cosmetic products may contain only subject to restrictions. Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 rewrites part of that Annex. It does three things at once:

• it inserts new entries, numbered from 327 up to 371;
• it replaces a number of existing entries, including entry 70;
• it deletes several others.

The effect on your pack is one sentence. Where one of these substances is present in the product above the threshold set in its own Annex III entry, that substance has to be named in the ingredient list, rather than resting inside the word PARFUM. The ingredient list itself is required by Art. 19(1)(g), Reg. (EC) 1223/2009.

That is the whole mechanism. It is a labelling amendment, not a ban.

You will also see a total quoted — 81 substances on one widely-read source, 82 on another, both read on 20 September 2026. We have not counted the consolidated Annex ourselves, so we are not adding a third figure, and it is not the number you act on anyway: what matters is which of those entries is in your formula.

The thresholds

There is no single threshold. The disclosure level sits inside each substance's own Annex III entry, and it is lower for a product that stays on the skin than for one that is rinsed off — which is why the same fragrance at the same dose can be declarable in a balm and not in a wash.

We are not printing the two figures here until someone at this practice has read them out of the consolidated Annex and dated them. They will appear on the regulatory watch page, dated, once that read has been done.

In the meantime the figure that decides your label is not the general threshold. It is the level of each listed allergen in the material you actually bought, lot by lot, and that comes from your supplier's allergen statement or certificate of analysis. Send those requests now: they are the long pole whichever threshold turns out to apply, and no part of this can be decided without them.

Does this only concern synthetic fragrance?

No, and this is the part that costs botanical brands money.

An Annex III entry restricts a substance. It does not ask where the substance came from. A restricted fragrance substance that occurs naturally in an essential oil is the same entry as the same substance bought as a single material in a drum (Annex III, Reg. (EC) 1223/2009).

Which means that if you formulate with essential oils, absolutes or distillates, you cannot answer this question by looking at your own recipe. You have to know what is inside each oil, at what level, for the lot you actually used. That number comes from your supplier's certificate of analysis or an allergen statement for that material. It varies by harvest, by origin and by lot.

The honest summary for a natural brand: this amendment turned a fragrance question into a raw-material documentation question. Brands that buy a named fragrance compound get an allergen statement from the house as a matter of routine. Brands that buy botanicals from a distributor frequently do not, and that missing statement is the single most common reason a file cannot be closed.

Does my safety report need reopening?

Separate the formula from the label.

The amendment is about labelling. If you have not changed the formula, the assessment of the formula has not been invalidated by this instrument. What the amendment does change is the artefacts that describe the product:

• The ingredient list on the pack — the named allergens must appear (Art. 19(1)(g), Reg. (EC) 1223/2009).
• The copy of the labelling held in the product information file — the file has to describe the product as it is (Art. 11(1), Reg. (EC) 1223/2009).
• The notification — the CPNP notification carries the product's labelling, so a relabel is a notification you revisit (Art. 13(2), Reg. (EC) 1223/2009).

Whether the safety report itself is reopened is a question about your specific file, not a general rule. It is reopened where the allergen work turns up something that was not in the assessment — a level higher than the file assumed, a material whose composition was never documented, or a substance the original assessment did not identify at all. A safety report is established in accordance with Annex I before the product is placed on the market (Art. 10(1), Reg. (EC) 1223/2009); if the information underneath it turns out to have been wrong, the report is the thing that has to change, not the paperwork around it.

What to do, in order

1. List every fragranced material in the product — compounds, essential oils, absolutes, extracts that carry an odour.
2. Get an allergen statement for each, for the lot you use. Ask the supplier in writing. If you get nothing back, that is the finding, and it is a finding about your supply chain rather than about the law.
3. Check each declared substance against its Annex III entry for your product type and your concentration.
4. Rebuild the ingredient list so that anything above its threshold is named (Art. 19(1)(g)).
5. Update the file and the notification to match the pack you will actually print.
6. Work out which of your stock was placed on or before 31 July 2026 and can be sold through to 31 July 2028, and separate it from anything you are still making.

Step 6 is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether you have a labelling job or an inventory problem.

The check will tell you whether your ingredient list is built correctly, whether your product is a cosmetic, and what else it is missing. It does not do the allergen arithmetic — that step needs the allergen statements for your materials and a person reading them. Run it for everything else, and bring us the statements when they arrive.

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