On a wintery morning in Brussels, a person walks into a meeting room with a coffee in one hand and the faint trace of fabric softener and perfume still clinging to their clothes. The agenda might read ‘Omnibus VI (Chemicals)’, but the room is already full of the invisible evidence that fragrance matters.
The impact of fragrance goes beyond the individual ingredients in consumer products. Yet when a key ingredient in a favourite detergent, perfume or cream quietly changes or is removed, people notice in a way no impact assessment can foresee. The fragrance sector sits at an intersection between everyday enjoyment and an increasingly demanding regulatory regime. It is this intersection that the Chemicals Omnibus proposal is meant to navigate.
The Commission’s starting point for the Omnibus proposal was necessary and sensible. Among other things, the Cosmetics Products Regulation contains a derogation process that, in tightly controlled cases, theoretically allows for the continued use of some ingredients with hazardous properties where cosmetic use is demonstrably safe. Such properties, after all, are not confined to laboratories: you encounter them when you walk through a pine forest, peel an orange or cook with spices.
Yet that ‘safety valve’ derogation has never worked in practice. Not a single derogation has ever been granted because the legal and procedural tests have proven almost impossible to satisfy. The Commission recognised this and did something refreshingly modest: instead of tearing the system up, it proposed to fix the plumbing so that the rules could function without lowering the bar on consumer safety.
The Commission’s Omnibus VI proposal kept the Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) as the gatekeeper. Ingredients with hazardous properties could continue to be used only if the SCCS issued a positive opinion based on realistic exposure, with conservative margins of safety and aggregate use. Around that non-negotiable core, the Commission then tidied up the legal clutter: it clarified what a ‘suitable alternative’ meant; removed a food-safety test that made little sense for products that are not meant to be eaten; recognised the importance of exposure routes; and set transition periods that match the practical realities of reformulation. In regulatory terms, it suggested reduced friction where complexity added no value – while easing the path to even safer products.
The Council’s recently published General Approach abandons that pragmatic balance.
On paper, the Council’s change to the ‘assessment of suitable alternatives’ test looks admirably simple. According to its revision of the proposal, companies should consider “all possible alternatives available” – not just a substance that offers a one-to-one substitution.
Unfortunately, what sounds straightforward in an EU press release can quickly become unworkable on the workbench of a perfumer’s organ.
If you must assess ‘all possible alternatives’, the task never ends. Mixtures, combinations, technologies; anything that might conceivably replace a function must be imagined, examined and somehow ruled out. For the fragrance sector, where each of its 3,000 ingredients have unique olfactive and physiochemical profiles, this turns a focused, substance-based test into an exercise in disproving an infinite number of hypothetical worlds.
This is a classic policymaking trap: proposing a rule that looks simple but that creates more confusion than it removes. It replaces clarity with boundless obligation, and precision with performative rigour.
Timelines tell a similar story.
The Commission tied transition periods to the date of application of new CLP classifications and proposed 12 months for placing products on the market and 24 months for making them available. This reflects the chain of events that happens in those months: companies must first be formally informed of the new rules, then the SCCS conducts its assessments, WTO notifications are made, mandatory scrutiny by the Parliament and Council occurs. Only then can manufacturers begin the practical work of reformulation, stability and safety testing, label redesigns and the logistical task of changing stock at hundreds of thousands of retailers across the EU.
In its text the Council shortened those windows to 6 and 12 months and started the clock earlier, from the date of entry into force. This looks like a simple change: the numbers are neat, the rule is easy to state. Yet in the real world, it will mean more emergency reformulations, more hurried decisions, and more prima facie safe products destroyed because the logistics simply could not keep up. The system looks cleaner on paper, but messier on the ground – and far less compatible with circular economy goals.
Moreover, it is toughest on exactly the businesses politicians usually say they want to support: small perfumeries, family-owned producers of cosmetic ingredients and essential-oil suppliers.
None of this is a plea to weaken safety. The fragrance sector’s excellence – in Europe and globally – is based on trust and rigorous safety science. A positive SCCS opinion remaining the decisive criterion is non-negotiable. The question is not whether the safety principle makes sense, but how to implement it in a way that actually does.
The Commission’s approach was, in essence, to say: let us prioritise safety where it really matters and bring precision and clarity where it is needed to achieve that priority. The Council’s text confounds simplification with effectiveness.
This is where the European Parliament can step up.
If Members of the European Parliament treat this simply as a technical clean-up, the opportunity will be lost. If instead it sees this as a question of how we design the choice architecture of regulation, it can still set the direction. The Parliament can insist that transition periods reflect how long science, supply chains and reformulation really take by anchoring them to the date of application and preserving a realistic timeline. It can restore the idea that alternatives must be viable in the real world, not just in the egg-themed Europa building. It can bring the focus back to risk assessment. And it can offer clearer rules for natural ingredients.
None of this will dominate the evening news in Member States. But if Parliament gets this wrong, people will one day discover that the scent they wore on their wedding day is no longer available, or that their favourite body cream has changed beyond recognition, not because it was unsafe, but because actually proving to the regulator it was safe was just too hard. And then those people are going to ask who’s responsible for that change and why.
Good regulation is often invisible. It allows people to enjoy the products they use every day, including those rooted in local regions and traditions, confident that safety has been taken seriously in the background. Parliament now has a boring but important task: to keep the Commission’s pragmatic, science-based core, to resist performative complexity and to ensure that Europe’s rules do what good fragrance already does every day: Make everyday life, almost imperceptibly, better.
Aurelie Perrichet is the Regional Director of Europe at the International Fragrance Association (IFRA).
