What “alcohol-free” is being asked for, and by whom

Three different people ask this question and they want three different documents. Work out which one you are before you ask anybody anything.

The first is a maker asking a performance question. They have used a thin, fast-evaporating diffuser liquid somewhere before, disliked how quickly the bottle emptied or how sharp it smelled on day one, and have concluded that an alcohol carrier was responsible. What they actually want is a base that behaves the way they want in a bottle, and the instrument for that is a trial, not a document.

The second is a maker with a buyer, a retailer or a marketplace listing that requires an alcohol-free declaration. What they want is paperwork with a name on it: something they can put in a file, point a buyer at, and rely on if the question is ever asked again. A product page cannot do that job for them, whoever published it, because a listing is marketing copy about a product rather than a declaration about a formulation.

The third is a maker with a safety or compliance question — flammability in transit, storage next to a workshop heat source, a hazard classification for a courier form. That one needs a Safety Data Sheet and a flash point specifically, and it is the one case where the absence of a published figure has an immediate practical consequence: with no flash point published for any base in this range, a maker who needs one for a form has to obtain it before filling the form in.

These three are worth separating because the first is answerable by you this month and the other two are not. A trial tells you how a base and an oil behave in your bottle, in your room, at a load you chose. It tells you nothing about composition. Conversely a composition statement tells you nothing about how your blend will look at day twenty-eight. Running one and reporting the other is the commonest honest mistake in this corner of the trade.

And it is worth being clear that this is not a CSI-specific problem. Reed diffuser bases are sold across India as finished carriers with a performance description, and composition is generally held as a formulation detail rather than published on a listing. The useful question is therefore not “which supplier's page says alcohol-free” but “which supplier will put a composition statement in writing against a batch number”. That is the question the live CSI page on qualifying a new base supplier is built around, and this page narrows it to the alcohol declaration specifically.

What the five base pages do publish

More than makers expect, and all of it quotable. Read it first, because it decides which questions are still open.

Start with the titles, because they are published text and they carry the positioning. All five bases are titled Reed & Car Diffuser Base. Pure Performance is published for strong throw and impact; Depth for complex, layered scents; Lift for uplifting, mood-boosting scents; Softness for gentle, comforting vibes; Longevity for scents that last. Four of those five name a scent character and Pure Performance's names a performance outcome, which is the difference that makes it the testing base.

Then the process, which is published in detail. Every page states load as a percentage of the total finished blend, with 10% as a starting point, 20% as the recommended working load and 30% as the maximum. Longevity publishes a slightly higher working band of its own — “The recommended working ratio is 70-75% Longevity Base with 25-30% fragrance oil.” — and a rest: “Rest the blend 24-48 hours before bottling for maximum stability and longevity.” Four of the five publish a clarity step, which is the same instruction in four wordings: reduce the fragrance percentage and retest if the blend clouds. The Lift wording is the clearest about what is being tested: “If clouding occurs, the fragrance oil may not be fully compatible at that load - reduce fragrance percentage and retest.”

Appearance is published too, and it matters to a maker in clear glass. Pure Performance says “Crystal clear appearance works with any label design and shows off coloured fragrance blends beautifully in glass bottles.” and Lift says “Easy to blend and bottle - shows off coloured fragrance oils beautifully and works cleanly with any glass diffuser vessel.” Longevity describes a correct outcome as “No clouding, no separation when used correctly.” and publishes copy about Indian conditions: “Does not evaporate too fast in Indian summer heat or fade too soon in humidity. Consistent diffusion performance across the range of temperatures that Indian homes, offices, and cars experience.” Depth publishes the one evaporation statement in the range: “Slows evaporation for a longer-lasting scent experience.” All of those are claims about a base's intended performance with fragrance oils, which is what they say and all they say.

And there is exactly one specification-style line in the whole range: Pure Performance's “Fixatives: None - clean base, no additives.” This is the sentence a maker looking for a composition statement will seize on, so read it carefully. It says that no fixatives have been added and that the base carries no additives. It does not name what the base is made of, it does not say anything about the carrier itself, and it makes no statement about alcohol. A clean base with no additives can be built on any number of carriers, and the line does not tell you which.

Set against that, here is the list of things no page in the range publishes: a solvent or carrier identity, a full ingredient or composition declaration, a Safety Data Sheet, a flash point, an IFRA certificate, an allergen list, a shelf life, an ageing figure, and an alcohol statement in either direction. That is not unusual for a finished diffuser base and it is not a reason to avoid one. It is simply the boundary of what a listing can be used for, and knowing where it falls is what lets you ask a precise question instead of a vague one.

Absence of a mention is not absence of an ingredient

The single most useful habit in raw-material buying, and the easiest one to drop when a listing nearly says what you want.

A listing that does not mention alcohol has told you nothing about alcohol. That sounds obvious written down and it is routinely ignored in practice, because a maker who needs an alcohol-free base reads a page, finds no alcohol in it, and files the page as evidence. The page is evidence of what it says. It is not evidence about what it does not discuss, and the distinction is the whole of this section.

The same logic runs in the other direction, which is worth saying because it is the half makers forget. A listing that does not mention alcohol is also not evidence that alcohol is present. You do not know. Not knowing is an ordinary and manageable situation — it becomes a problem only when it is dressed up as knowledge, in either direction, and then printed on a label.

Apply the habit to adjacent sentences too, because this is where it earns its keep. “Fixatives: None - clean base, no additives.” is a statement about fixatives and additives. “Crystal clear” is a statement about appearance. “Slows evaporation for a longer-lasting scent experience.” is a statement about diffusion rate. None of those is a composition statement, and a maker assembling three of them into one is building an inference the pages do not support. The test to apply is simple: could this sentence be true of a base that contained the thing I am worried about? If it could, the sentence is not evidence.

The habit is also the right one to carry to a supplier whose listing does say what you wanted to read. “Alcohol-free” printed on a web page is a claim without a document behind it unless a document comes with it — and a claim in a listing can be changed, reworded or quietly dropped when a formulation changes, which is precisely the event you need to be told about. So the question to a supplier who already advertises the claim is the same as the question to one who says nothing: put it in writing, against a batch, with a notification undertaking.

One more application, and it is the one this hundred of posts is built around. The published 10%, 20% and 30% load band appears on pages that say fragrance oil. The absence of an essential oil load on those pages is not permission to use the fragrance-oil figure, and it is not a statement that the figure is unsuitable either. It is silence, and the correct response to silence is a test rather than an assumption. The reasoning is identical to the alcohol case, which is why a maker who gets this habit right gets both questions right.

The load band, the convention, and the material it was written for

You will be quoting these figures to a buyer. Quote them in the right units and attribute them to the right material.

CSI's reed and car diffuser base pages state fragrance load as a percentage of the total finished blend. The published figures are 10% as a starting point, 20% as the recommended working load and 30% as the maximum, with 75% base plus 25% fragrance oil given as the typical working blend and a worked example that reads: for a 100 ml finished diffuser at 25% fragrance, use 75 ml of base and 25 ml of fragrance oil. So a 100 g bottle at the recommended rung is 20 g of oil with 80 g of base; at the published start 10 g with 90 g; at the typical working blend 25 g with 75 g; at the maximum 30 g with 70 g.

The candle convention is the reverse, because there load is a percentage of the wax weight, and most Indian diffuser makers arrive from candles. So the standard error is dividing the oil by the base rather than by the total: 20 g of oil into 80 g of base reads as 25% against the base and 20% against the total finished blend. If you are writing a formulation statement for a buyer, that difference is not cosmetic — a sheet that says 25% where CSI's convention gives 20% describes a blend nobody else will reproduce.

Then the attribution, which matters more on this page than on most. Those figures are published about fragrance oil. Every load figure in the diffuser range, the clarity step, the rest before bottling and the published family lists sit on pages that say fragrance oil. No CSI page publishes a load, a dose, a compatibility statement, a flash point, a safety data sheet, an IFRA certificate, an allergen list or a shelf life for any essential oil in a diffuser. If you quote 20% to a buyer as the load for your lavender essential oil diffuser, you are quoting a figure published for a different material, and you should say so in the same sentence.

The band is still the right place to start, for one reason that is honest and worth stating as such: it is the only published bracket in the range, so placing your own rungs at 10%, 20% and 30% brackets the whole published working range in one sitting and keeps your numbers comparable with every other diffuser sheet in the trade. That is a sensible starting bracket rather than a validated dose. The difference between those two phrases is the difference between a formulation statement you can defend and one you cannot.

One piece of published guidance does carry over cleanly, and you will use it whichever base you end up with. The clarity step — reduce the fragrance percentage and retest — is advice about a procedure rather than about a material, so it transfers honestly to an oil the pages do not cover. Longevity's wording includes the useful caution that “The blend should remain crystal clear. If clouding occurs, reduce fragrance percentage and retest. Heavy oils like oud can cloud at maximum load in some bases.” and Lift's caution at the top of the band reads “Test thoroughly - some oils may cloud at maximum load.” Procedures travel; material figures do not.

What to request in writing, and in what order

Five requests, one email, and a file you can hand to a buyer. This is the section to copy.

Ask the party that manufactures the base, and ask in writing, so that the reply is in writing. A phone confirmation from a salesperson is not a document, and it will not be there in eighteen months when a retailer's compliance team asks where the claim came from. Keep the request and the reply together, dated, in the same file as the batch records for the blends you made from that lot.

Ask for the alcohol statement first and specifically. “Is this alcohol-free?” invites a yes that means whatever the person answering wants it to mean. “Does this base contain ethanol or any other alcohol, and if so at what nominal percentage?” has only informative answers: a no, a figure, or a refusal to say — and a refusal to say is itself useful information you can act on, because it tells you the claim is not available to you from that supplier.

Then ask for the Safety Data Sheet, because it does several jobs at once. It carries the hazard classification, it normally carries a flash point, and it is the document a courier, an insurer or a landlord will ask for rather than a composition letter. An SDS is also a document whose format is standardised enough that a maker can tell whether they have been sent a real one, which is not true of a composition statement on letterhead.

The third request is the composition declaration itself, and it is the one most likely to be declined in part. Ask for a full declaration if it can be given, and a list of components present above a stated threshold if it cannot. A supplier who will not name the carrier may still confirm what is not in it, which is exactly the answer you need for an alcohol-free claim — and getting that in writing is a success, not a half-measure.

The last two requests are about time, and they are the ones makers skip. Ask which batch or lot the statement applies to, and whether it applies to future batches or only to that one. Then ask for an undertaking that you will be told in writing if the formulation changes. A claim on your label is a continuing claim; a statement against a single lot from two years ago does not support it, and a formulation change nobody told you about is how an honest maker ends up with a false label.

What you may honestly print while you wait

Replies take weeks. Here is what your label can say in the meantime without borrowing anybody's claim.

You may describe what you did. “Blended in India from a reed diffuser base and lavender essential oil” is a description of your own process and you are the authority on it. So is the load, provided you state it in CSI's convention and provided it is the load you actually used: “20% fragrance load, by weight of the total finished blend” is a sentence you can defend from your own batch sheet.

You may name the materials you bought. Naming a base and an oil is not a composition claim about either of them, and it is a great deal more useful to a customer than a vague reassurance. If you want to go further, say where the responsibility sits: “formulated and bottled by us from bought-in base and essential oil” is honest, and it tells a buyer who to ask about what.

What you may not print is a composition or safety claim you cannot support from your own file. “Alcohol-free” is such a claim. So is “non-toxic”, “natural”, “chemical-free”, “IFRA-certified” and any variant of them: each one is a statement about a formulation whose composition you have not been given, and each one is a statement you — not your supplier — will be asked to stand behind. The absence of a document is a reason to leave the claim off, not a reason to make it carefully.

And you may not print a benefit. No therapeutic, medicinal, wellness or aromatherapeutic effect belongs on a label or in a listing for any of these products: CSI publishes none, your trial measures none, and the claim is regulated. This applies to the published copy too. Lift is published as a base for uplifting, mood-boosting scents, and that title describes the fragrance character the base is built to carry rather than an effect on the person in the room — which is how it must be quoted if it is quoted at all.

The workable position while the paperwork is outstanding is therefore a narrower label and a fuller internal file. Describe your process, state your load in the published convention, name your materials, keep your batch records and your retains, and leave the composition claims blank until a document arrives that fills them in. A buyer who needs the claim will usually accept “we have requested the declaration and will send it on” far more readily than they will forgive a claim that turns out to be unsupported.

Choosing a base on what the titles publish

With composition off the table, the published basis for choosing is scent character — and CSI publishes that in some detail.

The published family map is the honest route. Lift names floral, citrus, green and fruity among the families it is built for. Longevity names oriental, amber, woody, resinous, balsamic, spicy and gourmand, and steers the other way for three families in its own words: “Light Florals, Fresh Citrus, Aquatics - use Lift Base instead for brightness and airiness.” Depth names complex, layered, gourmand, sweet and spicy. Softness is published for gentle, comforting scents, and Pure Performance is the neutral one, positioned on its own page for testing.

Now the two-step, because it is easy to overstate. Those pages name families, not individual oils. CSI classifies lavender and ylang ylang as florals, peppermint and marjoram as green, and lemon as a fresh citrus — and that classification is CSI's editorial judgement rather than a published fact about those oils. So the honest sentence for lavender is: lavender is a floral, and the Lift page names floral among the families that base is built for. No page in the range names lavender essential oil.

Lemon is worth separating out, because it reaches the same destination by a different published sentence. Lift's page does not name fresh citrus among its families. Fresh citrus appears in the range on the Longevity page, in the steer away from it: “Light Florals, Fresh Citrus, Aquatics - use Lift Base instead for brightness and airiness.” So the published route for a fresh citrus is Lift by elimination rather than by nomination, and that is a weaker published basis than lavender's. Worth knowing when you write down why you chose a base.

For a first purchase, Pure Performance remains the practical choice whatever your family, for a reason that has nothing to do with scent: it is the only base in the range sold in a 100 g pack, at ₹325.00, which is the size a documentation trial actually needs. The 500 ml pack is ₹1,099.00, and the four bases at that price — Pure Performance, Depth, Lift and Softness — hold the same ₹175.84 of raw material in a 100 g bottle at the recommended rung. Longevity is ₹1,296.00, which is ₹259.20 per 100 ml against ₹219.80, or ₹39.40 more.

And if what you really want is for the published figures to apply as written, there is a straightforward alternative worth weighing before you spend anything. Run the same six vessels with a fragrance oil in a family the pages name, and the load band, the clarity step, the rest and the family map all apply as published rather than as borrowed. CSI's florals such as British Rose at ₹342.20 for 100 g and Jasmine at ₹430.00, a fresh citrus such as Citrus Lemon at ₹300.00, and a resinous oil such as Woody Oud at ₹453.12 all sit in the families the base pages name. That is not an argument for preferring one material over the other and it carries no safety implication either way: it is the difference between testing inside a published range and testing a range you have borrowed.

The part you own: establishing your own pairing

No document settles this one, for any supplier. Six vessels do.

Whatever arrives in the post, the pairing between your base and your essential oil has to be established by you, because nothing in the catalogue publishes a load, a dose or a compatibility statement for any essential oil in a diffuser. The trial is small. Two neat retains of 10 g each — one of the base, one of the oil — sealed, dated and labelled with the lot or pack reference you recorded. One 25 g base-only control with no oil in it. Three 25 g arms at the published 10%, 20% and 30% rungs.

The retains are what makes this a documentation trial rather than just a clarity trial, and they are the cheapest insurance in the whole plan. 10 g of base is ₹21.98 at the 500 ml pack rate and 10 g of oil is ₹68.44, ₹90.42 for the pair. Their job is to be the physical link between the paperwork you requested, the lot you received and the blends you sold from it. If a buyer ever asks what was actually in the product, a dated retain and a batch sheet is the answer; a memory is not.

The arms are the ordinary three-rung ladder, and the weights are deliberately round. A 25 g arm at the published rungs gives 2.5 g of oil into 22.5 g of base, 5 g into 20 g, and 7.5 g into 17.5 g — nothing finer than half a gram to weigh, which a 0.1 g scale handles comfortably. The three loaded arms consume 60 g of base and 15 g of oil between them. The control adds 25 g of base and no oil at all, and costs ₹54.95 of material.

Read all four after the published rest, because that is the only duration CSI publishes anywhere in the process: “Rest the blend 24-48 hours before bottling for maximum stability and longevity.” Grade the control first — faint haze is a comparison rather than a measurement, and a vessel of base alone is what clear looks like in your glass, on that day, in that light. Then grade each loaded arm against it. If an arm clouds, the published response is on four of the five pages and it is the same instruction in each: reduce the fragrance percentage and retest.

Run it in matched glass. A 25 g arm is about twenty-five millilitres, so a 50 ml gold reed diffuser bottle is the right vessel — about half full, with a readable depth of liquid and a sensible headspace; the same arm in a 120 ml bottle is a shallow film under a lot of air. One pack of ten at ₹826.00 gives you 10 matched vessels for the 6 vessels this trial needs, leaving 4 for repeats. Keep reeds out of the sealed vessels: a reed changes the liquid it stands in, and the reeded arm is a separate observation that the sibling page on the five-arm first trial designs properly.

What the trial costs and what to buy

One small base pack, two small oil packs, one pack of glass. The cheapest line in your plan, and the one that protects the rest.

The trial consumes 95 g of base and 25 g of oil: ₹208.81 of base at the 500 ml pack rate and ₹171.10 of essential oil, ₹379.91 in total. One 100 g trial pack at ₹325.00 holds 100 g and covers the 95 g the trial needs with 5 g to spare — which is the first time in this series that the trial pack is exactly the right purchase rather than a slightly awkward one, because the retains and the four vessels together stay under 100 g.

If you expect to make product afterwards, buy the 500 ml pack instead and treat the trial as the first draw from it. That pack holds 500 g and leaves 405 g after the trial, which at the recommended rung is 5.06 finished 100 g bottles' worth — 5 whole ones. The rates run the other way: the 500 ml pack is ₹2,198.00 a kilogram against ₹3,250.00 for the 100 g pack, so the small pack is 47.86% dearer per gram, or ₹1,052.00 a kilogram more. On the 95 g this trial consumes that difference is ₹99.94, which is the honest price of not committing to a 500 ml pack before the documentation arrives.

On the oil, two 15 g packs of lavender essential oil hold 30 g and cover the 25 g with 5 g over, for ₹205.32. One 50 g pack at ₹342.20 covers it with 25 g over instead, for ₹136.88 more. Neither costs you anything per gram, because the rate is the same ₹6,844.00 a kilogram at every pack size that page quotes — the best rate among the packs it quotes is ₹6,844.00 and the 15 g pack already carries it. Buying the small packs is not a compromise here; it is simply buying the grams you need.

Add the glass and the list is ₹1,356.32: one 100 g base pack, two 15 g oil packs and a pack of ten 50 ml bottles at ₹826.00. That is 5.85% of the ₹23,196.00 that fifty finished units represent. With the 500 ml base pack instead the list is ₹2,130.32, or ₹2,240.32 with Standard freight on the base. Freight is quoted on the bases only, from the stored packed weights: 1 kg ships Standard at ₹110.00, the 0.1 kg trial pack at ₹80.00, a difference of ₹30.00.

Set that against what it protects and the case is not close. A fifty-bottle run at the recommended rung needs 8 packs of 500 ml base at ₹8,792.00 and 2 packs of 500 g oil at ₹6,844.00 — ₹15,636.00 of raw material, and those 8 base packs hold 4,000 g against the 4,000 g the run needs — exactly, with nothing to spare, so one over-poured bottle opens a ninth pack. The trial is 2.43% of that bill and 1.64% of the ₹23,196.00 the finished units represent; fifty units are 61.06 times what the trial costs. The live CSI page on 1 kg, 5 kg or 25 kg is the one to read when the bulk decision itself comes round.

What alcohol-free does not mean

Four things a maker reads into the phrase, none of which follows from it.

It does not mean safer. A formulation without alcohol in it is a formulation whose hazards have to be assessed on their own terms, exactly like one with alcohol in it. Flammability is one property among several, a carrier that is not an alcohol can still carry a hazard, and “alcohol-free” on its own tells a customer nothing about skin contact, eye contact, ingestion risk around children and pets, or what to do about a spill. Each formulation needs its own hazard assessment, whatever limits apply to it, its own stability testing and truthful ingredient labelling.

It does not mean natural, and natural does not mean safe. Those two phrases get used as though they implied one another and neither implies anything about the other. An essential oil is not safer than a fragrance oil because of where it came from, and a fragrance oil is not safer because it was built to a specification — the question in both cases is what the material is, at what concentration, in what product, and that question is answered by documentation and testing rather than by a category.

It does not mean slow-evaporating, which is usually the performance the maker was after. Evaporation rate in a reed diffuser depends on the whole system: the carrier, the oil, the load, the reeds, the neck of the bottle and the room. CSI publishes one statement about evaporation rate in the range, on the Depth page — “Slows evaporation for a longer-lasting scent experience.” — scoped to the fragrance families that page names, and Longevity publishes copy about Indian conditions: “Does not evaporate too fast in Indian summer heat or fade too soon in humidity. Consistent diffusion performance across the range of temperatures that Indian homes, offices, and cars experience.” Neither is a composition statement, and neither covers an essential oil. If evaporation is the real question, the live CSI page on measuring performance over thirty days is the instrument.

And it does not mean your blend will stay clear. Clarity is a property of the oil and base pair at a load and in the conditions, which is why CSI sells a 100 g trial pack at ₹325.00 and why four of the five base pages publish a step-down rather than a promise. A documented alcohol-free base can cloud with your oil at 20%, and an undocumented one can stay clear at 30%. The document answers a buyer's question; the trial answers yours. You need both and they are not substitutes.

Which leaves the one claim nobody can print under any circumstances, document or no document: a benefit to the person breathing it. No therapeutic, medicinal, wellness or aromatherapeutic effect belongs on your label or in your listing — CSI publishes none, your trial measures none, and the claim is regulated. “100% Pure” is the published title of the oil and is a statement about the oil's purity; Lift's published title names uplifting, mood-boosting scents and describes the fragrance character the base is built to carry. Base titles describe a fragrance; they do not describe what a diffuser does to anybody in the room.

Frequently asked questions