One of the things we’ve heard from customers over and over is how much they love our fragrance oils. We take pride in being able to offer some of the best fragrances available to our home soap makers and our small business customers alike, so our fragrance oils are tested rigorously to make sure that they meet our own expectations for both scent and performance.
If you’re interested in why we’re so proud of our fragrance oils, you’re in the right place. We’re happy to tell you all about our testing and selection process so you can be just as confident in the quality of our fragrances as we are.
Our quality standards for fragrance oils
Bramble Berry is a company built and run for crafters, by crafters. If a fragrance oil isn’t one we’d use in our own soaps and personal care products, we won’t pass it on to our customers.
That means that we test fragrance oils before we offer them for sale. We don’t just test them once, either.
We test in cold process soap to make sure that fragrances behave well. That means that we’re checking for discoloration, texture changes like ricing, and acceleration. We know a lot of our customers use our fragrance oils for making cold process soap, so we want to make sure these fragrance oils perform well every time.
All of our fragrance oils are phthalate and paraben free. Phthalates are ingredients often used in fragrance to make the scent last longer, so testing after cold process soap after it’s cured is really important. Our fragrance oils are also paraben free.
Fragrance oil selection
When we have established the themes and inspiration for a new fragrance oil collection, we start looking at samples. For each collection, we start with between 30 and 45 fragrances. We put each fragrance in a small, plain bar of cold process soap first. Colors can cue certain scents in our minds, so uncolored samples are going to get the least biased results. Uncolored soap also makes it easier to see color changes from the fragrance.
Our team evaluates these fragrance samples after the soap has cured for 4 weeks. When we test fragrances, we look for how the fragrance smells, the strength of the fragrance, and how well it matches our vision for the new collection.
This process narrows our fragrance selection to between 10 and 15 fragrances.
Fragrance oil testing
The small sample bars give us some idea of how the fragrance oils will perform, but we go a step further and test them again, this time in a 3 pound batch of soap with colors, swirls, designs; the works. This really puts the fragrance through the wringer to make sure that it works well as our customers would use it; not just in small, plain soap bars.
Typically, any fragrance oil that causes anything more than mild acceleration won’t make it into our customer’s hands. If we have a fragrance that we really love but it doesn’t perform up to our standards, we may even request a reformulation of that fragrance.
After the 3 pound batches have cured for at least a month, the fragrance evaluation is done again. We’re more critical this time. We make sure that we have the best of the best. We also test against the fragrance from the bottle, to make sure that saponification and curing don’t change the scent too much, and that it doesn’t produce any unpleasant scent notes.
After this process, we narrow our fragrance options down to the final 4.
Testing fragrance oils beyond just soap
After we’ve chosen the final 4 fragrances for the new collection, we start testing it in other products. After all, not all of our customers want to make soap. Some make candles, some make lotions, or bath bombs.
So we test them in these different products.
We typically test in candles and in lotions. In melt and pour soap and bath bombs, the fragrance typically performs the same as it would in lotions; it’s what you see is what you get.
For testing in candles, we look for wax discoloration, as well as hot and cold throw.
Once the fragrances pass all of these tests, a process that takes months, the collection is finalized and goes on sale for our customers.
Reformulating fragrance oils
There are a couple of reasons why we might need to reformulate fragrance oils; regulations and our own quality standards.
A little about fragrance regulation
The body that regulates fragrance is the International Fragrance Association, which is a global body representing the fragrance industry. IFRA’s regulations are updated yearly, and they determine the usage rate of fragrances across more than 12 different product categories.
Once that report is published, our fragrance suppliers reevaluate their recommended usage rate for the fragrances that they sell. If that usage rate is too low (below 2%, usually) in soap or lotion, we request that the fragrance be reformulated.
Low usage rates mean less fragrance in your products, which means that you won’t get the scent strength that you want from what you’re creating.
A recent report from IFRA changed the regulatory status of many fragrance ingredients, and around 200 of our fragrance oils needed to be reformulated.
Our reformulation process
We sent a request to our vendor listing which fragrance oils needed to be reformulated and the usage rate that we require for our fragrance oils. We request a small sample of each reformulated fragrance, and we test the fragrance in a single small sample bar of soap. After the bars cure for a month, we have a blind smell test using the new fragrance and 2 bars using our original formulation. This is to ensure that the fragrance smells just as good as the previous formulation. If half of the smell testers can select the new fragrance correctly, that sample is rejected, and we ask the vendor for a new formulation.
We will continue to request reformulated samples until we get one that’s not easily distinguishable from the old formulation.
After the reformulated fragrance passes that test, a larger sample is tested in a large batch of soap to check for performance in cold process soap. This helps us make sure that our fragrance oils perform as well as our customers expect them to.
In terms of reformulating on our own, we reformulated all of our fragrance oils so that they didn’t use phthalates. It was a grueling process that took 4 years to complete. Why did we do it? Because our customers asked for it. Read more about our Phthalate-Free Fragrance Oils.
You can see that our fragrances go through rigorous testing and are reformulated and improved regularly as needed to make sure that they’re the best that we can make them. We think that’s what our community of makers deserves. Check out our collection of fragrance oils and find a new favorite for your next project!
