How to read a baby product label

The front of a baby wash is designed to reassure. Soft colours, a sleeping infant, three or four words in a gentle typeface. Almost none of it is regulated, and none of it is where the information is.

The back is different. Under EU law the back of the pack has to tell you the truth in a fixed format, and it takes about a minute to read once you know what you are looking at.

Baby products are held to a higher standard — in the file, not on the label

Every cosmetic sold in the EU is governed by Regulation (EC) No 1223/2009, and every one of them needs a safety assessment by a qualified assessor before it can be sold. For products intended for children under three, Article 10(1) requires that assessment to be done specifically for that group. An adult body lotion cannot simply be relabelled for babies.

The reason is exposure, not toxicity. Infants have a higher ratio of skin surface area to body weight than adults, a skin barrier that is still maturing, and organ systems that clear substances more slowly. The same amount of the same ingredient on the same area of skin represents a larger internal dose. So the margins that make a formula safe for an adult are not automatically enough.

Alongside the regulation, the EDQM's guidance on cosmetics for children under three, built on Council of Europe Resolution CM/ResAP(2012)1, sets out what good practice looks like: preservatives at the lowest effective concentration, particular caution over potent allergens, endocrine-disrupting substances and nanomaterials, and a specific warning about packaging attractive enough that a small child mistakes the product for food.

All of this happens in the product's safety file. You will never see it on the bottle. What you can see is the ingredient list, and that turns out to be enough.

The four things worth checking

1. How long the list is, and what is at the top

Article 19 requires the full ingredient list in INCI names, in descending order of weight, down to 1%. Below 1% the order is free, which means the back half of a long list tells you very little — but the front half tells you a lot. The first three or four ingredients are most of the product.

For a baby wash or lotion, a shorter list is generally a better one. Fewer ingredients means fewer chances for a reaction and a smaller job working out what caused one if it happens.

2. Whether Parfum is on it, and where

Fragrance is the single most common cause of contact allergy in cosmetics, and it is the one ingredient in a baby product that exists purely for the adult applying it. Parfum or Aroma on the list means a fragrance is present; individual allergenic components appear separately by name.

That list of separately-named components got much longer recently. Regulation (EU) 2023/1545 expanded the fragrance substances that must be declared individually from 26 to more than 80. Products newly placed on the EU market have had to comply since 31 July 2026; products already on the market have until 31 July 2028. In practice that means labels you see over the next two years will not be consistent with each other, and a longer allergen list on a 2026 label does not mean the formula changed — it may only mean the disclosure did.

Names to recognise as fragrance components rather than actives: Limonene, Linalool, Citral, Geraniol, Benzyl Alcohol, Benzyl Salicylate, Coumarin, Eugenol, Citronellol. Essential oils bring these with them, which is why "fragranced only with essential oils" is not the same as unfragranced.

3. What is doing the cleaning

In a wash, the surfactants are the part that touches skin hardest. Glucoside-type surfactants (Coco-Glucoside, Caprylyl/Capryl Glucoside, Decyl Glucoside) and amphoterics (Cocamidopropyl Betaine, Sodium Cocoamphoacetate) are the mild end. True soap — saponified oils, listed as Sodium Cocoate, Sodium Olivate and similar — has a high pH and is harsher on infant skin than the marketing around it suggests.

"Soap free" is one of the few front-of-pack phrases that maps onto something you can verify on the back.

4. The symbols

• The open jar with a number (12M, 6M) is the period after opening. On a baby product that gets used daily this rarely matters; on something used occasionally it does.
• The hourglass means a shelf life under 30 months, and a best-before date has to appear with it.
• The hand-in-book means there is more information on an enclosed leaflet — usually because the pack is too small for the full list.

Words that mean less than they look

• Hypoallergenic. Not defined in EU law. Under Regulation (EU) No 655/2013 the claim must still be substantiated and must not imply a guarantee of zero allergic reaction — which no product can give.
• Dermatologically tested. Tells you a test was run. Says nothing about what the test found or how many people were in it.
• No tears / tear-free. Not a regulated term and not a safety claim. Every wash should still be kept out of eyes.
• Natural. Undefined for cosmetics. There is an ISO standard (16128) that defines calculation methods for natural and organic content, but using the word does not require following it.
• Not tested on animals. Animal testing of cosmetic products has been banned in the EU since 2004, of ingredients since 2009, and marketing products tested on animals since 2013. Every legal product on a European shelf is in this position.

A worked example from our own range

Our TENERIS™ Baby Foaming Wash starts with organic aloe leaf juice in place of water, cleans with caprylyl/capryl glucoside and cocamidopropyl betaine rather than soap, and carries no Parfum on the list at all — only a trace of vanillin. Twelve ingredients, and you can work out what each of them is for.

Our TENERIS™ Baby Body Wash does contain a low level of perfume, and Benzyl Alcohol appears on its list because EU rules require declared fragrance allergens to be named. We put that on the product page rather than leaving you to find it, because a parent choosing between the two should be choosing on that basis.

That is the whole approach: every product page in the baby range carries the full INCI list and states plainly whether there is fragrance in it. If a label makes you work to find that out, the label was designed that way.

General information about cosmetic labelling, not medical advice. Persistent rashes or skin reactions in an infant should be seen by a doctor or pharmacist.