Correction

You Cannot Work Out Percentages From an Ingredient List

The claim

“If it is third on the list, you can work out roughly how much is in there.”

The short answer

The label cannot tell you. The order rule ranks ingredients by weight down to 1%, and below that line they may be listed in any order. You can locate the 1% line. You cannot derive a percentage from it.

Evidence status

Settled

The Cosmetic Record · Published 2026-08-06 · Last checked 2026-08-06 · 18 sources · Corrections: none

1. The rule, quoted from both jurisdictions

The European ordering obligation is two sentences long, and those two are the whole of it.

The list of ingredients shall be established in descending order of weight of the ingredients at the time they are added to the cosmetic product. Ingredients in concentrations of less than 1 % may be listed in any order after those in concentrations of more than 1 %.

The American rule says the same thing in a different vocabulary, then offers something the European text does not. 21 CFR 701.3(a) requires “the name of each ingredient in descending order of predominance”. Paragraph (f) makes the 1% line explicit.

As an alternative to listing all ingredients in descending order of predominance, ingredients may be grouped and the groups listed in the following manner and order: (1) Ingredients, other than color additives, present at a concentration greater than 1 percent, in descending order of predominance; followed by (2) Ingredients, other than color additives, present at a concentration of not more than 1 percent, without respect to order of predominance; followed by (3) Color additives, without respect to order of predominance. Ingredients specified in paragraph (f)(2) of this section may be included with those specified in paragraph (f)(1) of this section and listed in descending order of predominance.

Nothing on an American pack tells a reader which of the two schemes the labeler chose. Both are lawful, both produce a list that looks identical, and the last sentence of (f)(3) lets a labeler move sub-1% ingredients back up into the sorted group as well. Only one of the resulting lists is sorted below the 1% line, and the pack does not say which.

Brazil is the case no English-language article covers, and the instrument usually cited for it is no longer in force: RDC 752/2022 was revoked by Art. 51(I) of RDC 907/2024, D.O.U. 23 September 2024. The successor carries the labelling article forward word for word. Among the data that must appear on secondary packaging, Art. 13(II)(i) requires “ingredientes ou composição (utilizando a codificação de substâncias INCI)”. That is the entire instruction, because it contains no instruction about order. We searched the consolidated text of RDC 907/2024 on 2026-08-06 for ordem, decrescente, proporção and 1%: none of those strings occurs anywhere in it.¹¹

2. “At the time they are added” — what that phrase quietly excludes

The European sentence does not rank ingredients by their weight in the product a reader holds. It ranks them by weight at the moment they went into the vessel. That is a fact about a batch record, and a batch record is not published.

Two further exclusions sit in the definition immediately above the ordering sentence. An ingredient means “any substance or mixture intentionally used in the cosmetic product during the process of manufacturing”, and the text then removes two categories from the count: “impurities in the raw materials used”, and “subsidiary technical materials used in the mixture but not present in the final product”.¹ Processing aids that do not survive into the finished product are absent by operation of the definition, not by anyone's omission; so is anything present as a contaminant of a raw material. Note also that the definition covers a mixture and not only a substance.

3. Finding the 1% line, and the three markers usually offered for it

The one thing the list genuinely encodes is a boundary. Two markers locate it, both inferences from published ceilings rather than from anything the pack states. A third is offered constantly and does not work.

A preservative at an annex ceiling of 1% or below. Phenoxyethanol is Annex V entry 29 of Regulation 1223/2009, capped at 1,0 % in the ready-for-use preparation.¹ It cannot lawfully be above 1%, and on a compliant European list everything above 1% precedes everything below it — so phenoxyethanol and every name printed after it lie in the unordered tail.

The colour block. Under Article 19(1)(g), colorants other than hair colorants “may be listed in any order after the other cosmetic ingredients”; under 21 CFR 701.3(f)(3), colour additives are listed “without respect to order of predominance”. By the CI numbers, the list has stopped being sorted in both jurisdictions.

The marker that fails: a named fragrance allergen. The Annex III entries carved out of “parfum” carry a disclosure floor, not a ceiling. The substance is named only when it exceeds 0,001 % in leave-on products or 0,01 % in rinse-off products, so the name means the substance is above 0.001% and nothing else — a floor three orders of magnitude beneath the 1% line, and no evidence about where that line falls.

What locating the line buys is exactly two bounds: everything below it is at or under 1%, everything above it is at or over 1%. It buys no value for any single ingredient, and it assumes the label is compliant, which is an assumption and not an observation.

4. What the list still cannot tell you, however carefully you read it

The gap between the third name and the fourth can be forty percentage points or four tenths of one; the notation is identical either way. The list does not state the grade or purity of a raw material, the pH of the finished product, whether an ingredient is encapsulated or free, or the ratio at which a plant extract was extracted. A single name covers all of those.

Nor do the other marks on the pack help. Annex VII of Regulation 1223/2009 is titled “Symbols used on packaging/container” and contains exactly three items: “1. Reference to enclosed or attached information”, “2. Period-after-opening”, “3. Date of minimum durability”. The open-jar symbol at point 2 appears where durability exceeds 30 months, followed by a period in months or years.¹ None of the three is a quantity.

One structural fact is worth having. Article 19(5) fixes the language of points (b), (c), (d) and (f) of paragraph 1 — and pointedly not point (g). The ingredient list is the one block of a European label that reads identically in every Member State, in a nomenclature that is nobody's national language.

5. “Parfum”: one word, and the allergens carved out of it

Perfume and aromatic compositions and their raw materials shall be referred to by the terms ‘parfum’ or ‘aroma’. Moreover, the presence of substances, the mention of which is required under the column ‘Other’ in Annex III, shall be indicated in the list of ingredients in addition to the terms parfum or aroma.

One word therefore stands for a composition that may run to dozens of substances, and the carve-out is the only crack in it. The set of 26 named substances is older than it is usually credited: it was the SCCNFP, the predecessor committee, that “identified in 1999 a set of 26 fragrance allergens with a well-recognised potential to cause allergy”. The Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety reviewed that list thirteen years later, in opinion SCCS/1459/11, adopted at its 15th plenary of 26–27 June 2012, confirmed the 1999 set was still relevant, and went further: on clinical experience alone it classified 82 substances as established contact allergens in humans, 54 single chemicals and 28 natural extracts.⁶

The named substances sit in Annex III. Entry 67 is 2-Benzylideneheptanal, better known as Amyl cinnamal; entries 91 and 92 are Oak moss extract and Treemoss extract; entry 45 is Benzyl Alcohol. Entries 68 and 79 no longer exist — Commission Regulation (EU) 2017/1410 deleted 79, removing HICC from use altogether.⁷ The Commission counts what survives in recital 5 of the amending regulation below: “Currently, 24 fragrance allergens listed in entries 45 and 67 to 92 of Annex III … are to be mentioned in the list of ingredients (individually labelled).”

Commission Regulation (EU) 2023/1545, in the Official Journal of 27 July 2023, extends individual labelling considerably: its recital 6 records 56 further fragrance allergens identified by the SCCS beyond those 24, and its Annex adds new Annex III entries 327 to 371 while replacing a block of existing ones. The transition sits in a footnote to those entries: “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.”⁵ The first of those dates has now passed.

The United States has none of this yet. 21 CFR 701.3(a) permits fragrance to be listed as fragrance, full stop. MoCRA added section 609(b) to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, requiring each fragrance allergen to be identified on the label, with the substances “determined by the Secretary by regulation” and a proposed rule due “not later than 18 months after December 29, 2022” — 29 June 2024.⁹ A Federal Register query restricted to FDA documents mentioning fragrance allergens, run on 2026-08-06, returns no such rule.¹⁶ The Unified Agenda entry, RIN 0910-AI90, “Disclosure of Fragrance Allergens in Cosmetic Labeling”, lists the NPRM at 11/00/2026.¹⁰

6. “+/-”, “may contain”, “and other ingredients”, “(nano)”

Four notations regularly get read as concentration information. None of them is.

“May contain” and “+/-” are a shade-range device. Article 19(1)(g) allows a decorative range marketed in several shades to list all its non-hair colorants together provided the words “may contain” or the symbol “+/-” are added, using CI nomenclature. In the United States the device is narrower: 21 CFR 701.3(g) permits an ingredient not in the product to be declared under “may contain” only where it is a colour additive, and (g)(2) attaches four conditions to the shared-declaration route.² In both cases the phrase means the substance may be absent entirely.

“And other ingredients” is a United States trade-secret ending. 21 CFR 701.3(a) allows it where an ingredient “is accepted by the Food and Drug Administration as exempt from public disclosure pursuant to the procedure established in § 720.8(a)”, and 21 CFR 720.8(b) sets out the six factors FDA weighs in deciding whether an ingredient's identity qualifies as a trade secret, beginning with “the extent to which the identity of the ingredient is known outside petitioner's business”.⁴ There is no European equivalent on the label: the words confidential and trade secret occur zero times in the consolidated text of Regulation 1223/2009, searched on 2026-08-06.¹

“(nano)” is the one qualifier in the whole list that describes physical form rather than identity: ingredients present as nanomaterials “shall be followed by the word ‘nano’ in brackets”. It is still not a quantity.

7. “Aqua”, thermal spring water and Latin binomials

Article 19(6) requires the ingredient list to be “expressed by using the common ingredient name set out in the glossary provided for in Article 33”. That glossary is reissued whole rather than amended, so the entry numbers move: Decision (EU) 2019/701 was repealed by Implementing Decision (EU) 2022/677, and that by Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2025/1175 of 16 June 2025, applicable from 30 July 2026 and therefore the version quoted here. Its annex is one alphabetical table of 30,418 numbered entries.⁸ Entry 2112 is AQUA. Entry 16016 is MARIS AQUA and entry 16018 MARIS SAL — sea water and sea salt have names of their own.

Thermal spring water does not. We searched the whole annex on 2026-08-06: no entry anywhere in it contains the string SPRING, and all 33 entries containing THERM name a micro-organism or a derived peptide — STREPTOCOCCUS THERMOPHILUS FERMENT at entry 27941, for instance — not a water.

So the finding is flat, and it is the answer for anyone who arrived here from a thermal-water page. “Thermal spring water” has no INCI name. On a European label it is declared as Aqua, exactly like water from any other source. Thermal water is a sourcing and marketing category defined by origin and mineral content, and neither is a nomenclature entry. A pack reading “Aqua (Thermal Spring Water)” is the glossary name plus a parenthesis the glossary does not supply.

Latin binomials work the same way. A botanical entry names a species and a plant part, and the glossary carries them at extraordinary length — entry 4 is one flower-extract name listing a hundred species. A binomial fixes identity: which plant, which part. It fixes neither how much nor how concentrated, and an “extract” may be anything from a strong tincture to a trace in glycerin.

The American ladder is older and fixed at its editions. 21 CFR 701.3(c) sends a labeler first to the name specified in § 701.30, then to the CTFA Cosmetic Ingredient Dictionary, second edition, 1977 and four other compendia incorporated by reference, then to “the name generally recognized by consumers”, and only then to “the chemical or other technical name”.²

8. Having an INCI name is not approval

This is the misreading that follows the others. A name on a list is a name, and the two bodies that assign and adopt those names both say so in writing. It is the same mistake in a different costume as reading a notification as an approval, which is what “Grau 2” does not mean in Brazil.

The Commission shall compile and update a glossary of common ingredient names. To this end, the Commission shall take account of internationally recognised nomenclatures including the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (INCI). That glossary shall not constitute a list of the substances authorised for use in cosmetic products.

The Commission repeats it on the CosIng glossary page — “This glossary does not constitute a list of ingredients authorised for use in cosmetic products” — and adds that it “does not establish an exhaustive list of ingredients and it is subject to updating”.¹⁵ The names themselves are developed by the International Nomenclature Committee; the Personal Care Products Council oversees the programme and publishes them in the International Cosmetic Ingredient Dictionary and Handbook. The Council's own page is unambiguous: “just because an ingredient has an INCI name does not mean that the ingredient has been approved for cosmetics”, and “the assignment of an INCI name to an ingredient also does not imply that the ingredient is safe, or that its use in a cosmetic product complies with the laws and regulations of the United States or other global regions”.¹⁴

An ingredient list is a nomenclature laid out in a partial order. It identifies, it ranks down to a line, and it stops. Everything a reader wants beyond that — the concentration, the grade, the permission — has to come from somewhere else.