California Prop 65

California's Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act of 1986, better known as Proposition 65, requires businesses to warn California residents before they buy a product that could expose them to any of roughly nine hundred listed chemicals. The list is long and includes substances that turn up routinely in everyday consumer products, including fragrances.

Perfume is a complex blend of sometimes hundreds of individual aroma molecules and the solvents that carry them. Two of the chemicals on California's list turn up routinely in perfumery materials: beta-myrcene, a terpene present in hops, lemongrass, ylang-ylang and many citrus and herbal oils, and methyleugenol, which occurs naturally in rose, basil and clove oils. Both are listed as causing cancer. Because we can't practically verify, bottle by bottle, which listed chemicals each producer's formula contains, we name those two and warn for every fragrance we sell to a California address.

California's rules ask a business to name at least one listed chemical for each kind of harm it warns about. We name chemicals we can actually account for in fragrance, and we warn about cancer, which is what those two chemicals are listed for. If a producer discloses an ingredient listed for reproductive harm, we will warn for that too, and name it.

A Prop 65 warning is not a statement that a product is unsafe or out of compliance with any federal safety standard. It means California has decided customers should be told that a listed chemical is or may be present. The producers we work with sell their fragrances throughout the United States and Europe under their respective cosmetic-safety regimes.

The state's official site, maintained by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, is P65Warnings.ca.gov. It explains the program, the chemical list, and what warnings do and don't mean.

For questions specific to one of our products, email hello@drydownboutique.com and we'll do our best to point you at the producer's published ingredient information.

See also our privacy policy, terms of sale, and shipping & returns.