Decoded Korea

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% Fragran...