The Mystery of “Fragrance”: How a Single Word Came to Mean So Much—and So Little

Walk down the skincare aisle of any American store and you’ll encounter a familiar word repeated across ingredient labels: fragrance. It’s small, unassuming, and easy to overlook. Yet behind this single word can sit dozens—or even hundreds—of undisclosed substances. To understand how this became standard practice, we have to step back nearly a century, to the foundations of cosmetic regulation in the United States.