Which IFRA category is my product?

Every IFRA certificate is a table of maximum use levels, one row per category. The whole table is useless until you know which row is yours. This is the lookup: find your product below, note the category, then read that row on the certificate.

Skin and body products

• Lip balm, lipstick: Category 1.
• Deodorant: Category 2.
• Perfume, eau de toilette, cologne, solid perfume: Category 4.
• Body lotion, body oil, body butter: Category 5A.
• Face cream, face moisturizer: Category 5B.
• Hand cream: Category 5C.
• Baby cream, baby oil, baby talc: Category 5D.
• Bar soap, shower gel, shampoo, rinse-off face cleanser: Category 9.
• Bath bomb, bath salts, bath oil: also Category 9 — diluted in the tub and rinsed away.

Home fragrance

This is where most guesses go wrong, because home fragrance is not one category.

• Candles and wax melts: Category 12 — no intended skin contact.
• Room sprays and aerosol air fresheners: Category 10B. Spray mist can land on skin, so a room spray is treated more strictly than a candle.
• Reed diffusers, plug-ins, incense, scent sachets: Category 12. The fragranced refill oil for a reed diffuser is Category 10A, though — hands meet it at refill time.

Household

• Dish soap, all-purpose cleaners, surface sprays: Category 10A — mostly hand contact.
• Laundry detergent: Category 10A when hands touch the product; sealed pods and tabs count as Category 12.

What is Category 4, exactly?

Fine fragrance: perfume, eau de parfum, eau de toilette, cologne, and solid perfume. Anything whose whole job is to be fragrance worn on skin. Because these carry fragrance at far higher concentrations than a lotion ever would, Category 4 has its own limits, separate from the skin-care rows.

Categorize by use, not by label

A fragrance oil sold as “candle fragrance” poured into a body butter makes a Category 5A product. The category follows what the finished product does on a body, never what the bottle of fragrance was marketed for. Same rule in reverse: your soap blend in a leave-on balm must be read against the balm’s row, and the ceiling there can be a tenth of the soap’s.

These definitions follow the 51st Amendment of the IFRA Standards; the official documents live at ifrafragrance.org. And if you would rather not keep the map in your head: pick a product category on a recipe in Alchemis and any fragrance limits are checked against the right IFRA row automatically. Not a certification — a second pair of eyes.