I just got this from candleshack ...
It made me think its now as complex to label candles as soap ........
CLP Demystified
What is CLP and what does it mean for your business?
Classification, Labelling and Packaging (CLP) is the European Unions implementation of a larger United Nations (UN) agreement called the Globally Harmonised System (GHS) relating to the classification and labelling of chemicals.
Amongst other things, it aims to standardise the way in which products containing chemicals are labelled worldwide. Whilst GHS is voluntary, CLP is law and applies to businesses of all sizes within the EU. It comes into force on the 1st June 2015 and applies to many different products, including fragranced products such as candles, diffusers, melts and more.
For home fragrance products, such as candles, CLP will require pictograms and a number of risk phrases to be included on containers and packaging. Here are some CLP pictograms that are likely to be applicable to many home fragrance products..
The actual pictograms and risk phrases required will depend on the exact mixture (i.e. wax and oil). So, a mixture would be defined as a particular blend of base and oil; i.e. candle wax with 8% 'Pure Eden' fragrance. A candle using a different oil or even a different concentration of the same 'Pure Eden' (i.e. 12%) will likely have different phrases and pictograms and would therefore require different labels.
CLP labels and Safety Data Sheets (SDS) are produced using fairly expensive software (£5k-£20k + annual fees) that references the 1400+ aroma chemicals in the IFRA chemical database. The software works out how much of each ingredient is in the 'mixture' and using the reference data, produces a series of phrases and pictograms applicable to that specific blend (mixture) as well as an SDS.
The good news....
At Candle Shack, we have purchased the software and completed training, so intend to help our customers by making CLP label and SDS data available for all of the fragrances we stock. We will provide the pictograms and risk phrases for each fragrance, for both candles and diffusers based on 10% perfume load in candles and 15% load (in Augeo) in diffusers. These will be available on the perfume pages before 1 Jun 15, which is the deadline for the classification and labelling of 'mixtures'.
We will also be posting a video before the 1st of June explaining in more detail the requirements for labelling candles for both CLP and fire safety, as we have seen many non-approved pictograms being used on forums etc. We hope this will help smaller companies stay on the right side of the law and provide much needed advice in an easy to understand format.
More Information...
CLP is a huge and very complicated subject and whilst we will ensure that our products are supplied with the correct information and will do all that we can to help our customers in terms of labelling, we regret that we will not normally provide CLP labels of SDS for fragrances purchased from other suppliers. We are also not CLP advisers, so would ask that you take the time to research CLP before contacting us, particularly for general CLP information. Detailed information on GHS and CLP can be found here...
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