What “Parfum” is hiding, and what changed on 31 July 2026

Parfum is the only entry on an ingredient list that is not an ingredient. It is a category. A perfume compound is a trade secret, and EU law lets a brand declare the whole of it under one name rather than list the fifty or eighty aromatic chemicals it contains.

117 of our 215 masks print that word, or the equivalent Fragrance or Aroma. On our reading of the printed lists, 136 masks carry a fragrance of some kind. That makes it the 5th most common entry across the whole corpus. One perfume line appearing on more labels than the most-used active ingredient in the dataset (Allantoin, in 83 masks).

masks print Parfum, Fragrance or Aroma

117masks print Parfum, Fragrance or Aromaof 215

name at least one allergen individually

78name at least one allergen individuallyin addition to the blanket word

distinct declarable allergens across the corpus

21distinct declarable allergens across the corpuscounted from the printed lists

Fragrance is also the reason most of the caution on this site exists. Across every mask here, the ingredients we grade as worth knowing about are overwhelmingly fragrance entries rather than preservatives, acids or actives. Contact allergy to fragrance is common, permanent once acquired, and the one label risk you can genuinely avoid by reading.

The blanket declaration has one long-standing exception. Since 2005, twenty-six named fragrance substances have had to be listed individually whenever they are present above 0.001% in a leave-on product or 0.01% in a rinse-off one. They sit in Annex III of the Cosmetics Regulation, entries 67 to 92. That is why a mask can print Parfum, Limonene, Linalool, Geraniol, the first word is the compound, the rest are the parts of it the EU decided you have a right to see.

Eleven of those twenty-six turn up on the masks we have read:

Twenty-six was always a scientific undercount. In 2012 the EU’s Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety concluded that a far larger group of fragrance substances had established contact-allergy evidence in humans. Eleven years later the Commission acted: Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 added 56 more substances to the individually-declarable list, taking the total past eighty.

The transition runs on two dates, and the distinction matters at the shelf:

• 31 July 2026. Products that do not comply can no longer be placed on the EU market, meaning newly supplied into it by a manufacturer or importer.
• 31 July 2028. Stock already in the distribution chain may still be made available: sold to you, from a shelf or a warehouse.

Which means the practical answer for anyone shopping between those dates is: labels in shops right now are a mixture. Two boxes of the same mask, side by side, can carry different-length ingredient lists, with the newer one naming more allergens, because it contains the same perfume and a newer legal obligation.

Half the allergens on these labels are the new kind

Our corpus shows how much difference the expansion makes. Of the 21 declarable allergens printed across these masks, 11 come from the original twenty-six, and 10 are substances added by the 2023 regulation. Almost all of the new ones are essential oils and their components, which is precisely the group that a naturally-scented mask relies on:

There is an irony worth sitting with. The masks most affected by a rule about fragrance allergens are not the synthetic-smelling ones. They are the botanical, plant-forward, naturally-scented ones. Lavender, bergamot, geranium and lemon oil are all genuine sensitisers, and until this regulation a label could carry them without naming what in them a dermatologist would want to know about.

The two thresholds, 0.001% and 0.01%, are a tenfold difference, and which one applies depends on a single question: does the product stay on the skin, or get washed off?

For masks that question splits the category almost in half. A sheet mask, a hydrogel patch and an overnight mask are leave-on products, held against the skin for fifteen minutes or eight hours. A clay mask or a wash-off gel is rinsed away. 161 of the masks here are the leave-on kind, 49 the rinse-off kind, and 5 are peel-offs, which are removed as a film and sit awkwardly between the two.

So a shorter allergen list is not evidence of a gentler formula. It can simply mean the mask belongs to the format with the looser threshold. This is the sharpest reason we publish the format alongside the list on every product page: on this one axis, sheet and clay masks are not being asked the same question.

“Fragrance-free” has no numeric definition in EU law. Claims are governed by the common criteria of Regulation 655/2013: truthful, evidenced, not misleading. That is a standard, not a threshold. In practice the phrase means no perfume compound was added for the purpose of smelling nice.

It does not mean the product has no smell, and it does not mean nothing in it can sensitise you. On our own reading of the printed lists, 10 masks here carry no Parfum and no individually declared allergen, yet still contain a scented botanical or essential oil. 36 masks in total carry an essential oil of some kind.

Contact allergy is specific. If patch testing has named your allergen, the individual declarations are the most useful thing on any label, and they are exactly what the 2023 expansion gives you more of.

1. Read past the word Parfum. The named allergens usually follow it, at the very end of the list. That is where they belong, below the ≈1% line, because a substance nameable at 0.001% is by definition tiny.
2. Count them. One declared allergen is ordinary; a long run of them means a heavily perfumed formula. The heaviest here is Shiseido Vital Perfection LiftDefine Radiance Face Mask with 14 of them on one label.
3. Do not read botanical as gentle. The newly declarable substances are mostly plant oils.
4. Check the pack, not only this page. With two label generations in circulation until 31 July 2028, the box in your hand is the only authority on what is in it.