Two bottles, side by side. One says fragrance-free. The other says unscented. Most people read those as the same promise, and shops stack them on the same shelf. They are not the same, and the gap between them is wide enough that an unscented product can contain more fragrance material than a lightly scented one.
If your skin has never once objected to anything, this is trivia. If it has, it is one of the most useful distinctions on the whole label, and it takes about ten seconds to check for yourself.
The short version
Fragrance-free is a statement about what is in the bottle: nothing has been added to give the product a smell. Unscented is a statement about what your nose does when you open it. Only one of those is a claim about composition.
A product can be unscented and still contain fragrance. Often that is precisely why it is unscented.
What fragrance-free is supposed to mean
Fragrance-free is a free-from claim, and free-from claims sit under Article 20 of the EU Cosmetics Regulation, which says a product may not be presented as having characteristics it does not have. The detail lives in Commission Regulation (EU) 655/2013, which sets six common criteria every cosmetic claim has to meet, and in the European Commission’s Technical Document on cosmetic claims, whose Annex III deals specifically with free-from claims and has applied since 1 July 2019.
The guidance is generally read as being stricter than most people assume: a fragrance-free claim is not considered appropriate where a product contains an ingredient performing a fragrance function, whatever else that ingredient also does. A botanical extract with a characteristic smell of its own is the case usually cited.
Two honest caveats. The term is not defined in the Regulation’s own text; it is a claim that has to be substantiated, interpreted through guidance. And that guidance is guidance, which the document says plainly: its views are not legally binding, and only the Court of Justice can give an authoritative reading of EU law. So fragrance-free is a disciplined claim that someone has to hold evidence for. It is not a certification mark, and it is not policed the way a certification is.
Why unscented is the slipperier word
Unscented has no definition of its own. The Cosmetics Regulation does not define it, and we have not found a standard anywhere that attaches a threshold to it. It describes a sensory outcome — this does not smell of much — rather than a fact about what went into the bottle. That is the whole difference, and it is why the two words behave so differently in practice.
Here is the part that surprises people. Raw materials smell. Plant oils, surfactants, some emulsifiers and plenty of actives arrive with a scent of their own, and it is rarely a nice one — nutty, waxy, faintly sulphurous, or just green. A formulator who wants a product that smells of nothing has two options: build around the problem, which is slow and constrains the formula, or add a masking fragrance, which is a fragrance composition designed to cancel a smell rather than create one.
A masking agent is still fragrance material. It is still declared as parfum or aroma on the ingredient list. And because it has to neutralise something rather than merely decorate, it is sometimes used at a higher level than the light scent on a product that makes no claim at all. That is the whole trick. Unscented describes the result, and adding fragrance is an entirely ordinary way to get that result.
It is worth being concrete about how that inverts. A body lotion with a soft, deliberate scent might carry a fragrance composition at a fraction of a percent, because it only has to be noticed. A bland-smelling cream built on a strongly odorous plant butter might need more than that just to bring it to neutral, because it has to overpower something first. Both are ordinary formulation decisions. Only one of them will be sold to you as the gentle option.
None of which makes unscented a dishonest word. Plenty of products described that way have nothing added at all, and the people writing the label are usually reaching for the word customers actually search for. It just means unscented is not the word to trust if fragrance is the specific thing you are trying to avoid.
Essential oils are fragrance too
This is the bit natural brands tend to skate past, so we will not.
An essential oil added to make a product smell pleasant is a fragrance ingredient. Being plant-derived changes nothing about that. The EU requires a defined list of individual fragrance substances to be named on the label once they pass small concentration thresholds, precisely because they are recognised contact allergens — and several of the most familiar ones, limonene, linalool, geraniol, citral and citronellol among them, occur naturally in citrus, lavender, rose and geranium oils. They appear on labels because they are in the plants, not in spite of it.
So “no synthetic fragrance” and “scented only with essential oils” are not fragrance-free claims. They describe where the fragrance came from. Both can be perfectly true and still not answer the question a reactive-skinned person is actually asking.
There is a labelling wrinkle worth knowing, too. Essential oils are not always tucked inside the word parfum. They are frequently listed under their own botanical INCI name — Lavandula Angustifolia Oil, for instance — which means a product can carry a good deal of fragrance material without the word parfum appearing on it anywhere.
How to check either claim in ten seconds
Ignore the front of the pack entirely. Everything you need is in the ingredient list, because Article 19 of the Cosmetics Regulation requires that perfume and aromatic compositions and their raw materials be shown by the terms parfum or aroma, and that individually declarable fragrance substances be named in addition to those terms.
Three passes down the list:
- Scan for parfum or aroma. Often written Parfum/Fragrance or Aroma/Fragrance. If either is there, fragrance has been added, and the front of the bottle does not get a vote.
- Read the last few ingredients. Declared fragrance allergens are conventionally listed at the very end: limonene, linalool, geraniol, citral, citronellol and the rest. Their presence tells you fragrance material is in there above the declaration threshold.
- Look for botanical oil names. Anything ending in Oil that belongs to a recognisably aromatic plant may be doing fragrance work under its own name.
If none of those three turn anything up, the product genuinely has no added fragrance. For the longer version — the ordering rules, the certification marks, the claims that mean less than they look like they mean — we wrote a separate piece on what to actually check on a skincare label.
When the front and the back disagree
Occasionally you will find parfum on the ingredient list of something the front of the pack calls unscented. That is not necessarily a breach of anything — unscented makes no claim about composition, so there is nothing to contradict. It is simply the label telling you two different things, and the ingredient list is the one with rules behind it.
Parfum against an explicit fragrance-free claim is a different matter, and worth an email to the brand. There may be a good answer; there may not.
One thing this check will not tell you is whether the product smells of nothing. No added fragrance means nothing was put in for scent. It does not mean odourless — a formula built on a raw material with a strong natural smell will still smell of that raw material.
Where our own range actually stands
Most of what we make is not fragrance-free. It would be strange to write all of the above and then quietly skip that.
The fragrance-free ones
Two, and you can confirm both from the ingredient list published on the product page:
- Sensitive Skin Moisturiser — no parfum, no aroma, and no declared fragrance allergens anywhere on the list.
- Sensitive Skin Overnight Cream — the same.
The seven that are scented
Contains added fragrance, listed as parfum or aroma on the INCI: the Oil-to-Milk Cleanser, Barrier Serum, Micellar Cleansing Water, Peptide AM/PM Cream, Calming Eye Cream, Moisturising Shampoo and Moisturising Conditioner. Several of those also carry named allergens at the end of the list — limonene and linalool on the shampoo and conditioner, for instance. That is disclosure working as intended rather than a warning label, but it is exactly what you would find if you ran the ten-second check on us.
And two that are neither
Two products sit in between, and they are the best illustration in the range of everything above. Neither has parfum on its ingredient list. Neither is called fragrance-free, because both have a light smell that comes from the raw materials themselves rather than from anything added.
- The AHA Peeling Concentrate has a light, naturally sweet scent, and nothing on its list is a declared allergen.
- The Hydrating Toner is built on rose flower water, which carries a faint herbal-floral note of its own. We describe it as having no added fragrance rather than as fragrance-free, for exactly the reason set out above: a raw material doing fragrance work is still fragrance work, even when nobody added a fragrance composition to the batch.
That second one is a distinction we tightened up rather than one we got right first time — the toner was described as fragrance-free until we went back to the manufacturer’s own specification, which says “no added fragrance” and openly documents the herbal-floral note. The stricter reading is the correct one, so that is the wording now.
Which one you actually want
Fragrance-free is not automatically the better choice. Scent is one of the main reasons people enjoy using something, and a routine you enjoy is a routine you keep.
Reach for fragrance-free if your skin reacts unpredictably, if you have been advised to avoid fragrance, if you are layering several products and want to keep the variables down, or if you would simply rather your face cream did not have an opinion. Otherwise unscented is fine — just read it as a description of the smell, not a promise about the contents.
Either way, the ingredient list settles it in about ten seconds. Ours is published on every product page alongside a plain-English note on what each ingredient is doing there. And if it is the fragrance-free end of the range you want, the Sensitive Skin Moisturiser is where most people start.