Many Ingredients in Small Amounts

If your product has many ingredients in very small amounts, it can be difficult to calculate the exact descending order for your ingredient declaration. There is, however, a trick that makes it way easier!

In the ingredient declaration, it’s always correct to place all the ingredients in descending order of predominance. That is, from most to the least in the product. That’s usually very easy, for the major ingredients. But when you have to list all the components of blended color additives, preservatives, or other ingredients, just figuring out the order of predominance can be quite hard.

Consider a soap that uses 1.1% Rose Pearl Mica and 1.1% Pink EcoGlitter (both from Brambleberry). The ingredients are cellulose, glycerin, water, polyurethane, polyurethane-33, acrylates copolymer, red #7, and aluminum (in the glitter) and mica, titanium dioxide, iron oxides (in the mica). There’s no way to put all those ingredients in descending order of predominance.

It’s Easy! You don’t need to figure out the exact percentages of the components of the colors. Even though the mica and glitter are each present at more than 1%, all of their components are only present at 1% or less, so they can be listed in any order. The color additives go at the end, regardless of amount.

So your ingredient declaration for a fragranced soap with pink mica and glitter might look like this (ingredients present at 1% or less in red bold and color additives in green bold):

NOTE: Even though cellulose, glycerin, water, polyurethane, polyurethane-33, and acrylates copolymer are components of the glitter, they are not approved color additives for cosmetics, so they are listed with the ingredients present at 1% or less, NOT with the color additives at the end.