Our Standards
We can't tell you which products will work for you. Everyone with fragrance sensitivity reacts differently. But we can filter the field for you, and show you what shoppers like you experienced.
This page explains what makes a product eligible for FFN, and how we help you narrow the list to what's likely to work for you.
Every product on FFN must be fragrance-free
That's the minimum. Two paths get a product onto the site, each with its own standards.
FFN Marketplace shops
The gold standard. To list on the FFN Marketplace, a brand must do more than make a fragrance-free product. Their mission must center on the fragrance-free community. Three things separate marketplace shops from everything else on the site:
- • Founded by people who live with fragrance sensitivity, or who care for someone who does. The brands here understand the issue because they live it.
- • Direct relationship with FFN. We work with each shop personally.
- • Every product checked at listing. No fragrance, no essential oils, no botanical extracts, no masking agents.
Amazon Finds
Products we hand-curate from Amazon listings. They give you access to a much broader catalog than the FFN Marketplace alone offers, including familiar brands you may already trust. We review each product before listing it, and admit only those whose label or product page says fragrance-free.
Every product page has a Report button. If you find a product that contains fragrance, tell us, and we remove it as fast as we can verify it.
Three layers of trust
The baseline is just the start. Two people with fragrance sensitivity can react to different things. We give you three layers of filtering to narrow the field to products likely to work for you.
The fragrance-free baseline
Already covered above. Every product on FFN clears the baseline before you ever see it.
Filter out what doesn't work for you
Some people react to essential oils. Some to parabens. Some to a single named ingredient. We let you filter by both:
- • Categories like Essential Oils, EU Allergens, Parabens, Sulfates, Formaldehyde-Releasers, MI/MCI preservatives, and others. Choose a category and we hide every product whose ingredient list contains any ingredient in that category.
- • Specific ingredients by name. Add Linalool, Limonene, Geraniol, anything else, and we hide every product containing it.
Filters stack. Choose two categories and three ingredients, and a product is hidden if it matches any of the five.
The categorization is ingredient matching assisted by AI, overseen by hand. Read about how we categorize ingredients →
Read what other fragrance-sensitive shoppers experienced
The third layer is the people. A product passes the fragrance-free baseline. It passes your personal filters. And then someone in our community, someone else who lives with fragrance sensitivity, leaves a review saying how it actually went for them. That's information no algorithm can give you.
To make those reviews trustworthy, we do three things:
- Verified status. When a reviewer completes their profile and shares their experience with fragrance sensitivity, we verify that they are a real fragrance-sensitive user before granting the green verified badge. A green badge means we have confirmed their sensitivity. It is not self-granted.
- Moderation. We screen reviews for legitimacy. We remove suspected fake or off-topic reviews.
- Reader reporting. Every review has a Report button. If something looks off, flag it, and we look.
What we don't claim
FFN is not 100% accurate. Labels miss ingredients. Manufacturers update formulas without updating labels. Our categorizations are sometimes wrong. Reviewers, even verified ones, can have a different reaction profile than yours. You still have to read the label yourself and decide what's safe for you. People react to ingredients no platform tracks, to ingredients at concentrations no platform measures, and to combinations no platform can predict.
FFN narrows the field. Your judgment does the rest.
When we're wrong, tell us
Find a problem on a product? Hit the Report button on its page. Anything else? Email [email protected] and tell me. I read every report.
Who builds this
I'm Karl Steele, and I built FFN. My mother has lived with MCS (multiple chemical sensitivities) for over forty years. Every "fragrance-free" product that wasn't actually fragrance-free betrayed her trust, and nothing existed to catch them before they came home. I built FFN to give our community the tools they needed.