Walk through the fragrance aisle of a beauty store and the word natural does most of the selling. Essential oils, botanical extracts, plant-derived aromatics. The implied contrast is with synthetic fragrance, which appears on ingredient lists as the single word "parfum" and carries a reputation to match.
We checked whether regulators treat the two categories differently. Our database holds 21,796 cosmetic ingredients and 31,191 regulatory entries across 10 markets. Of those ingredients, 1,517 are listed with a fragrance function. We sorted them by whether our records define them as plant-derived or as a chemical structure, and compared what regulators did to each group.
The answer has two halves that point in opposite directions.
Fragrance is a heavily regulated category
The group as a whole is worth a number first.
| Population | Ingredients | Carrying a regulatory designation | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fragrance functions | 1,517 | 305 | 20.11% |
| All ingredients | 21,796 | 1,486 | 6.82% |
Fragrance ingredients are designated at roughly three times the rate of cosmetic ingredients generally. Whatever else is true, this is not a category regulators leave alone.
One counting note before going further. Our records split fragrance function across two separate tokens that never co-occur: one used on 1,345 ingredients and another on 172. Counting either alone drops eleven percent of the population. The figures here combine both.
Splitting the group
Our ingredient records carry an origin definition written by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, and the two categories are written in visibly different registers.
Plant-derived entries name a species, a plant part, and an extraction method. Litsea cubeba fruit, volatile oil obtained by extraction. Chemical entries define by structure or reaction instead. "A terpene with the following structure." "The ester of benzyl alcohol and benzoic acid."
We classified on those signals: a two-word Latin binomial or an extraction verb marks plant-derived, a structural or reaction term marks chemical, and anything matching neither goes into a third group.
| Category | Ingredients | Designated | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plant-derived | 907 | 163 | 17.97% |
| Chemically defined | 591 | 139 | 23.52% |
| Unclear | 19 | 3 | 15.79% |
Chemically defined fragrance ingredients are designated more often than plant-derived ones. The gap is 1.31 to 1, which is real but not large, and it runs against the marketing rather than with it.
The gap depends on how you count
Counting by regulatory rows attached to each ingredient rather than by designation gives a much wider gap: 8.49 percent for plant-derived against 22.50 percent for chemical, a factor of 2.65. That version overstates the difference, and the reason is structural.
Eighty-six plant-derived ingredients carry a regulatory designation with no regulatory rows attached to them. The equivalent number for chemical ingredients is six.
The cause is how botanical ingredients are named. One species becomes many INCI entries: oil, extract, wax, water, flower, leaf, stem. Regulations are written against the species or a grouped name, so the rows attach to some of those entries and not others. Scots pine cone extract holds no rows of its own, while fourteen rows exist under names beginning with Scots pine, including one covering the oil and extract of Pinus sylvestris leaf and twig above a specified peroxide value. Peru balsam oil holds none, while the Peru balsam group holds twenty-five.
A chemical ingredient is one substance with one name, so this scattering does not happen to it.
We use the designation-based rate as the honest comparison, and a third field maintained separately by the ministry agrees with it almost exactly, which is why we trust it over the row count.
Where the direction reverses
Frequency is one question. Severity is another, and it answers the opposite way.
| Category | Limit only | Limit and prohibition | Prohibition only | Share involving prohibition |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plant-derived | 116 | 37 | 10 | 28.8% |
| Chemically defined | 122 | 9 | 9 | 12.9% |
This breakdown uses the ministry classification code rather than the status field, which is why the chemical row sums to 140 against the 139 in the table above. The two fields disagree on one ingredient.
Counted by regulatory rows rather than ingredients the split is starker still: 214 prohibitions against 158 limits on the plant-derived side, and 59 prohibitions against 430 limits on the chemical side. Prohibitions make up 57.5 percent of plant-derived rows and 12.1 percent of chemical ones.
The top of each list shows what that means in practice.
The fifteen most-regulated chemically defined fragrance ingredients are homosalate, ethylhexyl salicylate, diethylene glycol, salicylic acid, methyl alcohol, resorcinol, butylparaben, o-phenylphenol, sorbic acid, and a run of benzoates and parabens. Every one carries concentration limits. Two carry a prohibition alongside.
Eleven of the fifteen most-regulated plant-derived ones are citrus, and most of those carry a limit of one part per million. Lemon flower, leaf and stem oil. Grapefruit fruit water and grapefruit peel oil. Pomelo peel oil, pomelo water, and a combined pomelo and grapefruit water. Lime peel oil, lime peel water, lime leaf oil, Tahitian lime peel oil. Tangerine leaf oil. The four that are not citrus are cumin seed extract, bay leaf oil, rue oil and sassafras root oil, the last of which is prohibited outright in all eight markets where it appears.
A limit of 1 ppm and a limit of 10 percent are both limits. They are not the same instruction to a formulator.
The allergen list names molecules
Twenty-five ingredients in our data carry a proviso identifying them as fragrance constituents that must be named individually on the label rather than folded into "parfum". Every one of the 25 also carries a regulatory designation.
Their composition is the point. Twenty-three are chemically defined. Two are plant-derived.
The list is linalool, limonene, geraniol, eugenol, isoeugenol, citral, citronellol, coumarin, farnesol, benzyl alcohol, benzyl benzoate, benzyl salicylate, benzyl cinnamate, cinnamal, cinnamyl alcohol, anise alcohol, amyl cinnamal, amylcinnamyl alcohol, hexyl cinnamal, hydroxycitronellal, alpha-isomethyl ionone, methyl 2-octynoate, butylphenyl methylpropional, and two lichen extracts, oakmoss and treemoss.
Our records define linalool as a terpene with a given structure and geraniol as a terpene alcohol. Neither definition mentions a plant. The regulation names the molecule, not the bottle it arrived in. We found the same thing when we checked what regulators mean by sulfate.
A caution on reading that. Our data does not record which essential oils contain which of these molecules, so we are not asserting a relationship it does not hold. What the data does say is that the regulatory target is the compound.
What regulators actually watch: oxidation
Seventeen fragrance ingredients are regulated under names that specify a peroxide value threshold. Twelve of them are plant-derived, and almost all of those are conifer oils.
The named species include Scots pine, Siberian fir, Canadian balsam fir, silver fir, black pine, Swiss pine, Siberian dwarf pine, black spruce and white cedar, along with turpentine. The chemically defined side of the same rule covers alpha-terpinene, gamma-terpinene and terpinolene. Each is restricted or prohibited above 10 mmol per litre of peroxide.
Limonene is the clearest case. Five of its six regulatory rows are Korean prohibitions, and all five are conditional: prohibited when the peroxide value exceeds 20 mmol per litre, written separately for the d-, l- and dl- stereoisomers. The proviso attached to it also notes that limonene must be named on the label when present above 0.01 percent in rinse-off products or 0.001 percent in leave-on ones.
The same substance is permitted when fresh and prohibited when oxidised. That is not a rule about where a molecule came from. It is a rule about what state it is in when it reaches skin.
Where these markets differ
Fragrance restriction is not evenly distributed.
| Market | Fragrance rows | Fragrance ingredients | All rows |
|---|---|---|---|
| EU | 247 | 179 | 5,342 |
| Korea | 156 | 102 | 4,079 |
| ASEAN | 86 | 73 | 4,886 |
| Brazil | 80 | 64 | 4,052 |
| Argentina | 80 | 64 | 4,052 |
| Taiwan | 69 | 58 | 2,156 |
| China | 67 | 56 | 4,180 |
| Canada | 45 | 39 | 1,947 |
| Japan | 37 | 34 | 386 |
| US | 5 | 5 | 111 |
The EU and ASEAN hold comparable numbers of restrictions overall, but on fragrance specifically the EU holds 2.9 times as many. Korea ranks fourth on total restrictions and second on fragrance ones. The sharpest concentration is Japan, which holds only 386 restrictions in total but devotes 37 of them to fragrance, close to one in ten.
What these figures do and do not say
Row counts overstate severity. Of 872 fragrance regulatory rows, 186 are duplicates: the same restriction registered under two source ingredient codes, producing two rows for one market. Lemon flower, leaf and stem oil returns 39 rows covering 8 markets. Anyone citing our figures should count distinct markets.
A zero is not a clearance, and it is less informative for botanicals. An ingredient with no rows may be covered under a species-level group name that attaches to a sibling entry. This is the 86-ingredient gap described above, and it means a null in the plant-derived column carries less information than a null in the chemical one.
Our classification is a reading of definition text. We sorted on how the ministry wrote each origin definition, not on a regulatory taxonomy, because no such taxonomy exists in the data. Nineteen ingredients matched neither pattern and were left in a separate group rather than forced into one side.
Frequency and severity answer differently. The frequency gap of 1.31 to 1 is small enough that a different classification rule could move it. The severity gap of 2.2 to 1 by ingredient, or 4.8 to 1 by row, is not.
Methodology and sources
Ingredient data comes from the Korea Cosmetic Association ingredient dictionary. Regulatory entries are compiled from Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety open data covering restricted cosmetic ingredients, and from EU CosIng Annexes.
Figures reflect our production database as of 2026-08-27, holding 21,796 ingredients and 31,191 regulatory entries across the EU, Korea, ASEAN, China, Japan, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and the US.
Three separate fields were used to identify regulated ingredients: attached regulatory rows, an ingredient-level status, and a ministry classification code. The second and third agree to within a few ingredients across every cut in this analysis. Where they diverge from the first, the divergence is the species-naming effect described above, and we have reported both rather than choosing the flattering one.
Regulatory data changes, and the absence of an entry should be verified against the current official source before it is relied on for a compliance decision.
For the underlying data, see K-Beauty Cosmetic Ingredients on RapidAPI.
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