Your shampoo and body wash bottles are going to start having a lot more ingredients with “-ol” in them. Bloomberg reports that Procter & Gamble will begin identifying fragrance ingredients on their labels, a move not required by U.S. law. The company will begin online, starting with listing scent ingredients with concentrations over 0.01 percent in the fabric (including Tide), home, and beauty (among them Herbal Essence, Olay, and Pantene) categories.
“Our goal is to give people information that is clear, reliable and accessible. This is another step in our sustainability journey toward enabling consumers to make informed choices,” said Kathy Fish, Chief Technology Officer at Procter & Gamble in a press release. The move appears spurred by consumer demand for more “natural” beauty products. Gwyneth Paltrow told The Cut when she was launching her first “natural” perfume, “Fragrance-ingredient labels aren’t transparent, and because of that, you don’t know what’s in it … There’s so much research on this now and even mainstream companies are being forced to look at what their fragrance ingredients are because the consumer is starting to demand a cleaner product.”
P&G’s ingredient transparency move has been echoed by other beauty companies and retailers. Unilever, who owns Dove plans to also lists its fragrance ingredients online. Additionally, Wal-Mart will force all suppliers to list all of its product ingredients, and Target plans to implement the same requirement by 2020.
