Toxin Free (ish)

What Makes “Non-Toxic' Perfume Truly Clean? Your 4 Step Guide✨ Ep. 105

• Wendy Kathryn • Episode 105

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Just because a company claims to sell "clean" perfume doesn't mean it's actually free from harmful chemicals.

As a former environmental toxins attorney turned Clean Living Coach, I've discovered that most "clean" fragrance brands are still using synthetic ingredients and denatured alcohols that can disrupt your hormones and impact your health. 

The truth is, there are only four truly clean perfume companies on the market right now - and most popular "clean" brands don't make the cut.

Understanding what makes a perfume truly clean requires looking at three key factors: the alcohol base, fragrance ingredients, and transparency in labeling. 

While many brands claim to use "safe synthetics," this term has no regulatory definition and often masks the use of petroleum-derived chemicals that haven't been properly studied for long-term health effects.

In this episode, I break down exactly what to look for in a clean perfume, why denatured alcohol is problematic, and which four brands are creating genuinely clean fragrances. Whether you're dealing with sensitivities or simply want to make informed choices about what you put on your body, you'll learn how to evaluate perfume brands beyond their marketing claims.

In today's episode, we're chatting about: 

• Why "safe synthetics" is a meaningless marketing term 

• The truth about denatured alcohol in perfumes 

• How to identify truly clean fragrance ingredients 

• The only four brands creating genuinely clean perfumes 

• What makes a perfume actually safe versus just "clean" marketed

Wendy’s Non-Toxic Picks


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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Toxin Free podcast. As always, I am your host, a former environmental toxins attorney turned clean living coach, and today we're going to talk about the clean perfume industry. And, specifically, just because a company tells you they're selling you a clean perfume, do you even know what that means? Do you know the pieces of a fragrance that are actually toxic and what makes that particular brand clean at all? So I want you to walk away from this episode knowing you can look at a label, you can look at a product, you can go on a website, you can get served up an Instagram ad for a quote-unquote clean, non-toxic perfume, and you can actually know whether or not they're telling you the truth, because most of the clean fragrance out there is not what I would consider clean. So this episode is going to have three parts to it. The first part I'm going to quickly tell you what is in conventional perfume that is so bad for you, like everyone tells you it's toxic, right? Everyone's like, oh, fragrance is so toxic, fragrance is so bad for your hormones, fragrance is so bad for fertility. But I'm just going to give you some very specific ingredients and tell you what is in conventional perfume and why you legitimately, should be concerned about it and should avoid it. And then the second part of this episode is I'm going to tell you the parts of a perfume that you want to take a look at and what to check for. So is the company using botanicals or synthetics? Is safe synthetics actually a thing? We're going to dig into it, so you're going to know exactly what to look for. And then the third part of this episode is I'm going to tell you the four brands that are selling truly clean perfume, because right now, other than people who are DIYing with essential oils and selling on Etsy but I'm talking legitimate perfume companies there are only four that are making a truly clean fragrance, and I'm going to tell you exactly who they are. So let's dive in.

Speaker 1:

Hey friend, real quick. Before we dive in, I want to let you in on something important. You've probably noticed that I don't run paid ads on this podcast, and that is totally intentional and a core value of mine. This podcast, the editing, the hosting, the tech, the support is fully funded by you, not through donations, but by the simple act of using my affiliate links when you shop for products I love and use and, honestly, would share with you, even without an affiliate link. And here's my promise to you I only share brands I personally trust, use and believe in the same ones you're going to find in my house, if you popped over in the morning for a cup of coffee. And when you shop through my links, you get a special discount and I earn a small commission that helps keep this podcast going and allows me to say no to paid sponsorships. It's a win-win and something I feel good about. So when you hear me talking about a product during an episode break, just know it's my way of sharing what I love. No weird sponsorships, no outside influence and no paid ads, because this podcast it's not just mine, it's ours.

Speaker 1:

Let's start with why fragrance is actually so bad for you. There are some very specific ingredients that are lurking in your perfume that you need to know about. The first one is something that is probably the one that most people are aware of. So phthalates right, a diethyl phthalate is an endocrine disrupting chemical. It causes lots of reproductive toxicity. It lends itself to infertility thyroid issues. There is so much science and so much research showing that women actually both men and women so I'm talking about cologne too, guys. Okay, this is not just perfume for women. This is just fragrance in general, whether you're a male or a female. But a lot of the studies have taken a look at what happens when women give birth to babies and they have diethyl phthalate in their blood. And then also how does that impact fertility. Thyroid, breast cancer we have studies showing if you avoid endocrine disruptors like phthalates and things like parabens, that it can leave your system in as little as 28 days. The breast tissue that you have can actually reverse any cancer risk markers breast cancer risk markers. I've got an episode all about that and I'm going to link that in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

But phthalates is commonly used in conventional perfume and here's why it is a plasticizer. So you know how when you wear a natural perfume or an essential oil and it fades pretty quickly, but when you wear a synthetic perfume, you literally can smell it on like the clothes you're wearing for days. That is, it's not only, but a lot of that is phthalates. Phthalates are sticky, they're plasticizers. They help a fragrance stick and last a lot longer. It's also used in the alcohol to denature it, which we're going to talk about that in the second part of this episode. So hold that thought. But they are very, very commonly used in perfume, so we definitely want to avoid that.

Speaker 1:

Another ingredient that is used a lot in the perfume industry is called Lileal. Lileal is a reproductive toxin that has been banned in the European Union since March of 2024, but they knew five years prior. So the European Union gave perfume companies five years to stop using this ingredient. They said, listen, this is a reproductive toxin, we know it. They call it a repro toxin. We're going to ban it, but going through that process and those regulations and those laws is going to take some time, so we're going to tell you ahead of time. You need to start getting it out of your products. And so March of 2024 came around and they banned it. So what is Lillil? Lillil is kind of like a lily of the valley type synthetic chemical, and it's a very, very popular fragrance ingredient that people just really love the smell of, and that's why it's used so much. It's also one of those ingredients that can lend itself to longer lasting fragrance, which is why it's so popular.

Speaker 1:

And then the third one is a musk ambrite. Now this ingredient specifically has been linked to early puberty in girls. I have an entire podcast episode about it being a hormone disruptor and why you really want to avoid musk ambrite. So those are kind of like the big controversial ones where we have really good science that shows that these ingredients in perfume really impacts our health. But there's a lot of others. There are a lot others, but those are the big ones and those are the ones that are really hormone disrupting that you should be really concerned about.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so you know that you should be avoiding these conventional perfumes. You probably don't know what's in them. So what should you be looking for? And you probably are being hit up all the time with Instagram ads, right From Dime, from Henry Rose, a new company, larimore, that's out there. All of these, you know, clean, non-toxic perfume companies so-called that are trying to build themselves as a safer, less toxic alternative. But let's take a look at when you get served up those ads. This is what I want you to look at.

Speaker 1:

These are the parts of a perfume or cologne or any kind of fine fragrance that I look at when I'm reviewing a perfume. So the first thing I look for is transparency and actual ingredients. If you are looking at a perfume, dossier is one of the companies that does this. It's just going to say fragrance, that's it. They're not going to tell you what the actual ingredients are. Fragrance is proprietary. It is a protected intellectual property that they do not have to disclose, and so most companies don't. You won't ever know what's in it, and the thing about that lie that is currently still out there.

Speaker 1:

There is technology. Anybody can take a fragrance and run it through some tests and some technology and know exactly what's in it. There's no secrets anymore. The fact that people say, oh, I don't want people stealing my recipe, that is not a thing. It hasn't been a thing for a very, very long time. So if you have a brand making a fragrance and they're not telling you what's in it, well then I just pretty much assume they're hiding something, because they probably are.

Speaker 1:

So the first thing I look for is absolute transparency. Are they listing out the actual fragrance ingredients? It should be a pretty long list of ingredients that are on there. So that's number one. If they're not being transparent, move on. That is not clean, not going to do that.

Speaker 1:

The second thing you want to look for is are they using botanical fragrance ingredients or are they using synthetic ingredients? So this is an important distinction, right? We know a ton about how botanicals and plants and vanilla and those things impact our body or don't, or improve our mood or actually, you know, help our health rather than adversely impacting our health. But we don't know a lot about the synthetic fragrance ingredients and what's being used in them and what it actually does to our body. So when I look for a perfume, if I want it to be absolutely clean, I'm going to be looking for, like, botanicals. I want to see sandalwood, I want to see rose, I want to see bergamot, I love neroli. I want to see actual plants on the list of ingredients. Now, this is so important.

Speaker 1:

You are going to see the words safe synthetics everywhere Companies like Dime, companies like Henry Rose, companies like Skylar. These are companies who are making synthetic perfume. There might be some botanicals in there. You're going to see some botanicals, but you're going to see a lot of synthetic ingredients and they're going to say these are safe synthetics.

Speaker 1:

Listen, that is not a word or two words that mean anything. They mean nothing. The words safe synthetics don't mean anything. They mean nothing. The words safe synthetics don't mean anything. They mean whatever the brand wants them to mean, and I mean that truly, there's no regulatory definition, there's no standard definition. There's no agreed upon definition. It literally means nothing.

Speaker 1:

So when I go and review perfumes and I see a list of synthetic ingredients and they all say, oh, these are all safe. My question is always according to who that they're safe? Because when I go in and start researching them, I see a lot of issues. And the problem with this safe synthetics are most of them are new. Most of them are ingredients we don't have a lot of research on. They could potentially be fine or they could potentially not be fine. The vast majority of them are made from petroleum, they're derived from petroleum products. I see a ton of synthetic musks and while things like what we call nitro musks, which we know are serious endocrine disruptors, you're really not going to find those anymore. Musk Ambrite would fall into that category.

Speaker 1:

I am seeing a lot of other types of synthetic musks that are new to the market, that chemical companies are saying, oh, these are better, these aren't toxic like the other synthetic musks. But the truth is we just don't know. We don't have human studies, we don't know what it's going to do to our body, and so there's a risk. There's a risk that these safe synthetics, a few years from now we're going to find they actually are toxic, or maybe they're endocrine disruptors, or maybe they're carcinogenic, or maybe they're neurotoxic we don't know. And so that's the problem with this industry is chemical companies make ingredients, we put them out into the world and we're like oh, I wonder what's going to happen now. I wonder what that's going to do to humans. I wonder what that's going to do to our water supplies. I wonder how that's going to affect everyone's health. And then add that that you don't know how it's going to interact or tip the scales with all of the other crap that we're exposed to. And so I'm really leery of companies who use quote unquote safe synthetics.

Speaker 1:

Now, there is one kind of safe synthetics that I'm actually fine with, and that is the safe synthetic. That is what I call a nature identical molecule, so something that you can take a plant and you can put it through a chemical process and you can create a synthetic bio or nature identical. Sometimes companies will call them bioidentical, where it is the exact same ingredient. It's the same molecule that you would find in a plant. These are not petroleum derived. These are things that are made and synthesized in a lab, but they are exactly the same thing, the exact same molecule that you would find if you extracted them from a plant. So they exist in nature. They're just being made synthetically. I am comfortable with that. I've seen enough studies to show that it acts the same in the body. They don't have the unintended consequences of these other synthetic ingredients. So I actually am somebody that if a company is adding some nature identical molecules, that's okay for me.

Speaker 1:

If you're going to call something a safe synthetic, it better be that, because anything other than that, or anything other than something that has significant research to prove that it's safe and it's not an endocrine disruptor and it's not carcinogenic and it's not going to cause cancer and it's not mutagenic and it's not a reproductive toxin. If we don't know all of those things, how can you call something safe? The word safe makes people believe it's marketing. It's just all marketing. I call them safer. Okay, right now. Right, because they're safer right now, until we know more. So that is definitely something.

Speaker 1:

When you're looking at a perfume, where does the scent actually come from? Is it coming from botanicals? Is it coming from plants? Or is the company telling you that they're using synthetic chemicals? That really matters? And then the last thing you want to look for in perfume is the alcohol and actually alcohol, most perfumes, the majority of the actual ingredients of the perfume, is made up of alcohol. That's how it aerosols and it sprays into the air or, you know, you put it onto your skin. And so here's the thing you need to know about the alcohol that is found in perfumes.

Speaker 1:

The United States has very strict alcohol regulations, and so if a company wants to make a perfume and sell it, they have to do what we call denaturing Denature, as in like going the opposite of nature. So let's take an organic sugarcane alcohol and let's say you want to use a pure, organic sugarcane alcohol in your perfume and then you want to sell it. If you do not denature that alcohol with something that is toxic to drink, something that makes it poisonous for consumption, then the government is going to make you pay alcohol taxes. They're going to assume that you're selling perfume, that people are going to go home and drink right, like rum. They're just going to treat you like you are selling a drinkable alcoholic beverage, even though you're very clearly selling a perfume. They don't care, they don't differentiate. You're going to have to pay the taxes and so, by using a pure alcohol, the cost of your perfume it's double. It's pretty much double the cost to get a non-denatured alcohol to make for a perfume. So you're going to pass that cost onto the consumer and so it's just way more expensive to make.

Speaker 1:

The other piece that makes this hard is if you want to use a pure alcohol in your perfume. Makes this hard is if you want to use a pure alcohol in your perfume. Whoever's manufacturing your perfume, they have to have a liquor license and it is very hard. And if you didn't listen to my interview with my friend Gaia, the CEO of Wild Notes, that was the previous episode you can go back to. We talk about how hard it was to find a manufacturer that one could manufacture a perfume and carried a liquor license. Our government makes it really hard to make a clean perfume and it's very sad actually. I mean, who's going to go buy perfume and freaking drink it like it's rum? If you're not, you're going to go buy rum. This is something that needs to change if we want the industry to move into another direction.

Speaker 1:

So what is used in these denaturants? So you can denature an alcohol two ways. You can use essential oils, which sounds amazing, right, like yay, let's just denature it with essential oils. Well, we tried that. You know what happens. You know what happens when you denature an alcohol with an essential oil. Your perfume smells just like that essential oil. It's so overpowering. You can't make a perfume or a fine fragrance that has all of that undertone of like peppermint and eucalyptus or those really strong essential oils that you can legally use to denature your alcohol. So then the only thing you're really left with if you want to make a beautiful perfume or cologne, is to do an odorless denaturant. And there's a regulation that gives you a list and says these are all of the things that we will consider a true denaturant.

Speaker 1:

They're all poisonous, they're all petroleum derived and that phthalates, which I already talked about, those hormone disruptors. That's what used to be used in 99% of all perfumes as the denaturant. They used the phthalates to denature the alcohol, to make it poisonous, to make it undrinkable, so it would be considered denatured so that they didn't have to pay alcohol taxes on it. So people are slowly they're like, oh crap, people know phthalates are bad. Now and now consumers want phthalate-free fragrance and so, in order for a company to claim to be phthalate-free and take phthalates out of their recipes. They're using TBA, which is tert-butyl alcohol, which is also petroleum-derived chemical, and while right now we don't think an endocrine disruptor is as bad as phthalates, there are some other issues with it. So, literally these perfumes, our government is forcing companies to make them poisonous in order to avoid those alcohol taxes. So I personally will only use a perfume from a company that is using non-denatured alcohol and I'm happy to pay the extra cost to know that I'm getting something that doesn't have petroleum-derived chemicals in it.

Speaker 1:

So over the last a few months actually over the last six months, and especially during my time being able to consult and work on Wild Notes, which was such a joy I have done a deep dive on pretty much every single perfume company out there that's claiming to be non-toxic company out there that's claiming to be non-toxic, and there are four. There are four. There are only four companies that I have found, and I'm sure there's obscure, smaller companies. Like I said, people are doing small businesses, diys, companies that I don't have visibility on, but as far as the ones that are out there that are well-known, there are only four that use an organic or a non-denatured alcohol as the base of their perfume.

Speaker 1:

All of the scent that's coming from the perfume is 100% botanical. They're not using any synthetic ingredients whatsoever and they fully disclose every single ingredient that's in their fragrance. Every single one is on their website. There's four. I'm going to tell you what they are.

Speaker 1:

Okay, the first one, wild Notes, which you already just learned all about in the previous episode and so you could go back and listen to it. But Wild Notes is organic sugarcane alcohol only. There are no synthetic denaturants. Sugarcane alcohol only. There are no synthetic denaturants. All of the scents come from either regenerative farms, organic farms, everything, everything is sourced from the best quality botanicals that you can find and, honestly, their perfumes smell amazing. They smell so amazing. They are launching in mid-March. If you're listening to this in mid-March, I've already got links over on my website and if you're not listening to this yet, there is a waiting list over there that you can hop on. That link is down in the show notes.

Speaker 1:

So the second company is Essis Beauty. I love Essis Beauty the two women who left the fragrance industry and started their own perfume company. That is definitely a brand that I just love so much. They have a wide variety of perfumes to choose from. The third one is One Seed, which is an Australian company. It's actually not easy to find their products here in the US, but they are starting to sell more at retail establishments. If you live in a big city, sometimes you can find it and you can also purchase it online. They just ship it from Australia. So one seed. And then the last one is Abel Fragrance, and I really love the complexity and the sophistication of Abel Fragrance and I also love that they're really clear on which ingredients. They call them biotech, but really they're just taking plants or seeds or something else. They're fermenting it, they're doing something natural with it to change it, to make it more long lasting. So Abel has done a really good job creating very natural, very clean, very beautiful scents, and it's a company that I really enjoy. So that's it, you guys, that's it. There's only four. There's four on the market.

Speaker 1:

Everyone else is either using a bunch of synthetics they're not disclosing or they're using denaturants in their alcohol. I just want to wrap this up by saying there is nothing more important to our health than what we put on our body every single day, and perfume is one of the things that we put on our body every single day. We're not just putting it on our skin, so it's getting into our skin and into our bloodstream. We're inhaling it also, and so really think carefully about how important using synthetic perfume is to you, and if you are somebody who was like you know what I love the smell of synthetic perfume, that's okay. I mean, we're toxin-free-ish for a reason.

Speaker 1:

The point of this episode was to make sure that you had full informed consent. You understand what's in conventional perfume. You understand why it's bad for you, but you also know how to not be tricked by marketing and companies that are selling themselves as a clean fragrance. You now know what to look for to see. Is that just a marketing trick or are they actually clean? I'm going to make this so easy for you. If you hop over to toxinfreeishcom backslash fragrance, you're going to find a list of those top four really clean, 100% botanical brands that I just told you about, including some discount codes. But I also understand for those of you who are like you know what, wendy, I am okay with some of those synthetic perfumes. I went ahead and organized a list of some of the safer options that are transparent, and so those are going to be your cleaner options and you're going to find a list of those cleaner options on that page as well, so head on over to toxinfreezecom. Backslash fragrance. Thank you for being here and I'll see you next week.