You might be surprised to know that companies don’t have to tell you about all the skin allergens in the products they make. In the European Union, disclosure of 26 skin allergens is required. In the United States and most other countries, there are no rules requiring allergen transparency. And to us, that didn’t seem right.
So, in May of 2017, we shared a list of the 368 skin allergens that might appear in our products, and a commitment to share product-specific details soon. By the end of the year, we had added them to our ingredient lists on WhatsInsideSCJohnson.com for more than 8,700 products.
Why would we go to such lengths? We believe in telling the whole story.
With our skin allergen transparency, SC Johnson has again gone beyond our industry and beyond current regulations for ingredient disclosure.
Skin allergens can appear among fragrance ingredients and in other formulas as well. Other companies use similar ingredients to those that we use, they simply don’t communicate the details about skin allergies. We consider it helpful to disclose these ingredients, particularly for people with a pre-existing skin allergy.
As our Chairman and CEO, Fisk Johnson, explained, “For us, transparency is a matter of principle. We’re interested in helping people make the best choices for their families. Just like when we started listing preservatives, dyes and fragrances, we didn’t stop with the industry standard. We want to tell the whole story. This is just the next step we are taking in our journey to be more and more transparent.”
With the addition of skin allergen information, SC Johnson’s ingredient transparency program now provides product-specific fragrance and skin allergen information for more than 8,700 products sold by the company around the world.
In fact, with the expansion of our transparency program into Asia Pacific in 2017, our ingredient list website, WhatsInsideSCJohnson.com, now serves more than 5 billion consumers.
