FROM THE LABORATORY
This guide is the working document we use inside the laboratory — the same criteria we apply when classifying which fragrances qualify for this collection. It is written for the customer who has already read past the marketing copy and wants to see the standard.
A perfume bottle should be the easiest object in your bathroom to evaluate. It contains, on average, between fifty and one hundred ingredients. The label, in most cases, lists one of them: parfum. Pregnancy is the season when that asymmetry stops being acceptable.
Under EU Cosmetic Regulation 1223/2009 and Health Canada's Cosmetic Ingredient Hotlist, perfumers are permitted to declare an entire fragrance composition under the single ingredient name parfum (or fragrance). The justification is intellectual property: the formula is the perfumer's craft. The consequence, for the wearer, is that the bottle on her vanity may legally contain compounds she has actively chosen to avoid in every other product in her routine.
Three families of compound are routinely concealed inside parfum:
None of these substances is on a typical fragrance label. All of them are on the regulators' watch list.
An endocrine-disrupting compound is a molecule that interferes with hormone synthesis, transport, binding, or metabolism. The endocrine system orchestrates fetal development. Early gestation contains windows during which exposure to even low doses of disruption — measured in parts per billion — produces effects that no later intervention can reverse. The European Food Safety Authority, ECHA, and the Endocrine Society all describe pregnancy as the period of highest vulnerability across a human life.
This is not a fringe position. It is the consensus statement of the discipline. The disagreement in the scientific literature is over which specific compounds carry which specific risks and at what doses — not over whether endocrine disruption during pregnancy warrants caution.
Natural perfumery, as Aimée practices it, replaces the undeclared synthetic palette with whole plant extracts: essential oils, absolutes, CO2 extracts, tinctures. Each of these materials carries a CAS number and an INCI name. They are declared. You can read them on a label and look up what is in them.
What natural perfumery does not do is automatically remove every contraindication. Several essential oils are excellent in the right context and unsuitable during pregnancy:
The list above is not exhaustive. It is the working subset our perfumer reviews against every formulation classified for pregnancy.
A fragrance qualifies for our pregnancy-safe collection when:
Of our fifty-four fragrances, thirty-seven currently meet all five criteria. The remainder are excellent fragrances in the right context — they are not, by our standard, the right context for someone who is pregnant.
The INCI on an Aimée bottle, like every cosmetic INCI, is ordered by descending concentration down to one percent, then in any order below that. The first three to five lines do most of the work.
What you should not see on a pregnancy-safe label, in any concentration: diethyl phthalate, galaxolide or HHCB, tonalide or AHTN, BHT or BHA, oxybenzone, octinoxate. None of these appear in any Aimée formulation.
The first trimester often comes with olfactory hyperacuity — a heightened sensitivity to scent that can make perfumes you have worn for years feel intolerable. This is hormonal, not psychological, and it tends to fade by mid-second trimester. During this window, our perfumer recommends citrus-forward fragrances (bergamot, neroli, mandarin) over heavy oriental or chypre compositions, and applying to a single pulse point rather than a full toilette.
The second trimester is, for most women, the most comfortable for fragrance. Skin is well-perfused, sillage develops cleanly. Our floral and soft-woody compositions perform here.
The third trimester often brings warm skin, slower metabolism of top notes, and a tendency for fragrances to project more than usual. A lighter hand at application will read more proportionate.
Once your baby has arrived, perfume continues to be wearable — applied with intention. Our recommendation: pulse points away from any skin in direct contact with your baby. The nape of the neck and the inside of the wrists tend to be more comfortable than the décolleté or the inside of the elbow during a nursing season. The fragrance is for you, and the work is to keep it that way.
Our pregnancy-safe collection is the simplest entry point — every fragrance in it has cleared the criteria above. The discovery format, with seven 2ml vials, is the most honest way to find the one your skin holds best during this season. Credit toward a full bottle is included with each set.
— Valérie Demars, perfumer
The fragrances below are the subset of our catalog formally cleared against the criteria laid out above. Each carries the full INCI on its product page — share it with your clinician if you have specific sensitivities they're tracking.
Seasonal notes from Valérie on the ingredients, evidence, and craft behind this guide.
