Our facility
Materials are handled, decanted and compounded in our own facility, which holds two registrations with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and operates under current Good Manufacturing Practice.
| Registration | Framework | Covers |
|---|---|---|
| Food facility registration | 21 CFR | Processing, packing and holding under the FDA's current Good Manufacturing Practice requirements for human food |
| Cosmetic facility registration | MoCRA | Facility registration required of cosmetic manufacturers under the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act |
Registration numbers are available on request.
The two registrations reflect what a fragrance and flavour house actually does. Aroma chemicals and naturals cross both worlds — a great many of the materials in this catalogue have flavour applications as well as fragrance ones — so the facility is held to food-grade manufacturing practice and registered for cosmetic manufacture alongside it.
This does not make our materials food. A food facility registration describes how the facility is operated and inspected — it is not a statement that any given material is edible, food grade, or fit for consumption. Nothing we sell is supplied for ingestion, for use in food or beverage, or for vaping. See our intended use terms.
If you need material for a flavour application, say so when you order. That is a different specification and a different document set, and it is not what a standard fragrance-grade bottle is sold as.
cGMP is a discipline rather than a badge. What it means in day-to-day terms is that the things which are easy to do informally are instead done in a controlled way:
- Written procedures. Filling, labelling, cleaning and release follow documented procedures rather than habit.
- Traceability. Incoming material, lot assignment and what left the building are recorded, which is why every bottle carries a lot reference and why we can issue a certificate against it.
- Controlled changes. A change to a procedure or a specification is recorded and approved, not made quietly.
- Cleaning and cross-contamination control. Between materials and between lots — which matters more in aromatics than almost anywhere, since carryover is detectable by nose at concentrations no assay would flag.
- Trained personnel. The chemists and perfumers doing the work are qualified to do it, and that qualification is on record.
What this does not mean. Facility registration with the FDA is required of establishments of this kind and does not constitute approval or endorsement of the facility or its products by the FDA. It also does not make a material safe for skin, and it does not transfer to your finished product — compounding under cGMP upstream does not put your own product in compliance.
ISO certification
We are working toward ISO certification, and do not hold it yet. Veriscents is a new business and that process takes time to do properly. We would rather say so plainly than let the FDA registrations above be read as covering something they don't.
When certification is granted we will name the standard and the certifying body here.
Identification
The most common failure in this trade is ambiguity about what is actually in the bottle. A material sold under a trade name, with no CAS number and no supplier, cannot be reordered reliably or documented for a safety assessment.
So every material we list carries, where it exists:
- CAS number and chemical name — the unambiguous identifier.
- Synonyms and trade names — because the same molecule is sold under different names by different houses, and you should find it under whichever you learned.
- Manufacturer or origin — who made it, or where it was distilled.
- Odour family, note behaviour, strength and substantivity — how it behaves in a formula, not only what it smells like.
- Suggested working range and evaluation dilution — a starting point, not a rule.
- Appearance, solubility, flash point, shelf life and storage guidance.
Where we don't hold a field, we leave it blank rather than filling it with something plausible. An empty field is information; an invented one is a hazard.
Documentation
We issue and hold four kinds of document, and they answer different questions:
| Document | Answers | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Safety Data Sheet | How do I handle, store and ship this safely? | The material as supplied |
| IFRA Certificate of Conformity | Does this conform to the IFRA Standard? | The amendment named on the document |
| Allergen statement | What must I declare on my label? | Per material, and per lot for naturals |
| Certificate of Analysis | What did testing show for my bottle? | A specific lot |
Published documents are in our SDS library, IFRA documents and certificates & specifications. Anything not yet published is available on request, and we would rather send you a document than have you guess.
Documents describe our material, not your product. Once you dilute, blend or compound, the assessment of what you have made is yours. We can tell you what went in; we cannot certify what comes out.
Quality checks
Materials are checked on receipt against the supplier's documentation — identity, appearance and odour conformity — before they enter stock. Anything that does not smell like what it says it is gets rejected, regardless of what the paperwork claims. Odour is a fast and unforgiving test, and our in-house perfumers are the people applying it.
Stock is rotated so that materials ship well inside their useful life, and stored to the same conditions we ask you to keep: cool, dark, closed and away from ignition sources.
Dilutions & fills
Evaluation dilutions and kit fills are prepared in our own laboratory to a known strength, in a stated solvent, and labelled with both. A bottle marked 10% is 10%, in something you can identify.
This matters more than it sounds. A pre-diluted material of unknown strength in an unnamed solvent is nearly useless for formulation — you cannot scale a formula from it, and you cannot tell whether an effect came from the material or the diluent.
What we will not claim
A standards page is only worth reading if it also says what is not true.
- We do not claim FDA approval or endorsement. Our facility holds two FDA registrations and operates to cGMP, which is not the same thing — see our facility above.
- We do not hold ISO certification. We are working toward it, and will name the standard and certifying body here when it is granted — not before.
- We do not describe materials as “natural” or “organic” unless the supplier's documentation supports it.
- We do not publish analytical figures we have not seen. Odour descriptions, working ranges and example accords are formulator's guidance, not specification.
- We do not claim materials are safe for skin as supplied. Almost none of them are.
When we get it wrong
Sometimes a material is mislabelled, a document is out of date, or a description is simply inaccurate. Tell us and we will correct it, publicly, on the product page — and if the error affected what you received, we will make it right.
Accuracy in a catalogue like this is maintained by the people using it. Report anything that looks wrong.