IFRA (International Fragrance Association)

The International Fragrance Association (IFRA) was founded in 1973 by leading fragrance houses as a self-regulatory response to growing scientific and public scrutiny of fragrance-ingredient safety, rather than waiting for external regulation to arrive. Headquartered in Geneva, with an operations centre in Brussels, IFRA has been led since 2024 by Alexander Mohr, under a Board chaired by Paul Andersson. Membership comprises multinational "Regular Members," national fragrance associations (23 as of late 2022) and "Supporting Members" from countries without a national association of their own.

IFRA's central output is the IFRA Standards - a continuously updated list of ingredients that are prohibited, restricted to a maximum concentration, or subject to specific-use criteria - based on safety data gathered by the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM). The Standards have gone through more than 50 amendments, and every reputable perfume house and fragrance supplier globally formulates against them, whether or not their home country has fragrance-specific legislation of its own.

For a UK reader, IFRA is the reason a fragrance's ingredient list looks the way it does - it functions as the de facto global safety law of perfumery even though it's an industry self-regulatory body rather than a government regulator. UK and EU cosmetics regulation incorporates IFRA-referenced restrictions rather than writing entirely separate rules, which is why membership of bodies like the BSP explicitly requires IFRA-registered training routes, and why CTPA's regulatory advice sits downstream of IFRA's own standards work.