Scenting a Bath & Body recipe
Fragrance oils, essential oils, and the two things that decide how much goes in — the method's own ceiling and the IFRA category your product actually falls into.
Bath & Body draws on two scent shelves — Fragrance Oils and Essential Oils — and you can blend across both in one recipe. What changes from product to product is how much goes in, and what the percentage is a percentage of.
Two different questions
There are two separate limits at work, and they answer different things:
- The method's ceiling is Hi Ellie's own guidance for how much scent a product of that kind can carry, and it is set per method rather than per fragrance. A lotion's is by far the tightest, and the Collab lotion form says so on the form itself — its Scent section is labelled "optional — 1% leave-on ceiling".
- The IFRA category maximum is the safety limit for a specific fragrance material in a specific kind of product, read off the certificate on file for that fragrance.
Both apply. The tighter one wins.
The method ceilings
| Method | Ceiling | Percentage of |
|---|---|---|
| Cold Process / Hot Process / Liquid | 6% | the total oil weight |
| Melt & Pour | 3% | the total base weight |
| Bath bomb | 6% | the total batch (the bomb's own weight) |
| Scrub | 6% | the total batch |
| Lotion / butter | 1% | the batch |
These are hard limits. A recipe whose scent load is above its method's ceiling is refused at Save — in the wizard, in a variant, and on the manual form, which checks it while you type rather than at the end. There is no override and no "save it anyway".
The Melt & Pour figure is deliberately conservative: no field on the M&P base shelf carries a per-base ceiling, so the app uses a safe default rather than pretending to have read your supplier's block.
The lotion figure is the one worth pausing on. 1% is not a rounding of the 6%; a lotion is a leave-on product and has far less headroom than something you rinse off. A load that reads "moderate" on a soap bar is near double the safe maximum on a lotion.
The IFRA category your product falls into
Hi Ellie reads the fragrance's certificate for the category that matches what you're making:
- Category 9 — "Rinse-Off and Bathwater Products / Soap / Shampoo". Soap bars, liquid soap, bath bombs, and scrubs (a body scrub is rinsed off in the shower).
- Category 5A — "Body Creams / Leave-on Body Products". Lotions and butters.
These are not interchangeable. Across the fragrance catalog rows that carry both figures, the rinse-off allowance is the looser of the two on about 60% of them — so quoting a soap allowance on a lotion overstates the safe load far more often than not.
Where a fragrance's certificate states a maximum of 100% for a category, that isn't a restriction — the app treats it as "unrestricted in this category" rather than showing you a 100% ceiling as if it were a limit you could aim at.
Essential oils
Essential oils sit on their own shelf and blend alongside fragrance oils. Two fields on an essential-oil row do real work beyond the scent itself: the botanical name (which is the actual identity of the oil — "lavender" names several different plants) and the INCI name, which is what appears on a printed ingredient statement for a cosmetic-classed product. See Ingredient statements and compliance.
Blends
When you pick more than one scent, each carries a share of the blend and the shares sum to 100. The recipe shows the blend broken out line by line, with the total load beside it — so you can see both "40% of the scent is lavender" and "the scent is 4% of the oils" without doing the arithmetic yourself.
Tip: if a fragrance's flash point, IFRA figures or usage rate aren't on its pantry row, put them there. Hi Ellie would rather work from your supplier's real number than from a default. (A printed label's allergen line is a separate thing — it comes from the fragrance catalog's own extracted supplier document, not from what you type on the row. See Ingredient statements and compliance.)