BRAND VALUES & COMMITMENTS
Donations & Charitable Giving
When any percentage of OSMOFOLIA's profit is used to make a donation or support a cause, you'll be able to read more about the recipients here:
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One Tree Planted
OSMOFOLIA is an official brand partner with One Tree Planted, an organization that works toward global reforestation in critical communities and ecosystems. For every full size and/or every sample set purchased through OSMOFOLIA, one tree is planted.
As of 09/22, the project we are currently supporting is the Oregon reforestation project! Their website states:
We rely on Oregon forests for our economy, our way of life, our climate and our future. We work with community partners to restore healthy watersheds so that people have clean water to drink and beautiful places to play, and so birds, fish and other wildlife can thrive. We engage youth to develop the next generation stewards who know and love our forests, from oak woodlands to majestic conifer forests.
Oregon has the technical resources and the volunteers, but often the missing piece is the cost to purchase the trees. Your contribution helps plant trees with various watersheds throughout Oregon.
If you'd like to donate to this cause or another reforestation project, you can find their website here!
You can also view our tree certificates, as well as other planting updates when they're made available to us, here.
The Institute for Art and Olfaction
The Institute for Art and Olfaction is an incredibly precious resource for scent-lovers and perfumery-learners. Not only is this nonprofit dedicated to access, education, and experimentation with scent, but they're also devoted to the goal of democratization of scent. They provide a wealth of information, from their databases to their classes, and we think that work should be supported. OSMOFOLIA makes a quarterly donation to the IAO.
If you'd like to learn more about the IAO, check out their mission statement, peruse their calender of upcoming events, or even make a donation to support their work.
Transparency
As makers, we believe that businesses small and large have the duty to be transparent with customers. As buyers, we also believe in the right to know what's in the products we buy, where our money goes, and how businesses operate. To that end, here are some of our commitments to transparency:
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Ingredients
Complete ingredient lists for every scent—yes, full ingredient lists!—are available for your curiosity and your safety. OSMOFOLIA perfumes are formulated from scratch by the perfumer, and do not contain candle oils/stock oils, bioaccumulative musks or nitromusks, or extracts of endangered plants.
While natural extracts and aroma chemicals are beautiful and of course have a place in perfumery, OSMOFOLIA scents also use synthetic ingredients for safety and sustainability purposes. For more information, please read the FAQs.
Sourcing & Suppliers
The suppliers for all of our materials can be found here:
Artifiscent Ltd. [private website]
Pricing
Price transparency is important to a push for consumer ethics. To that end, our FAQ section has an in-depth breakdown of the pricing of our products. While the details can be found there, a summary of our pricing is included below.
Total cost to produce and ship (approximate):
$8.90 per 8ml bottle of perfume oil
$7.30 per 5ml bottle of perfume oil
$2.54 per 1ml sample of perfume oil
$6.94 per tin of solid fragrance
Profit margin (approximate):
~64% per 8ml bottle of perfume oil
~62% per 5ml bottle of perfume oil
~36% per 1ml sample of perfume oil
~54% per tin of solid fragrance
Partnerships & Social Media Promotion
When products are given to reviewers or influencers, their usernames & the details of the partnership are posted here.
Samples were gifted to the following people:
@queerperfume (TikTok, instagram) — private feedback requested
@thescentdiaries (TikTok, instagram) — private feedback requested
@uncommon.smells (TikTok, instagram) — private feedback requested
@lizzielovesperfume (TikTok) — private feedback requested
@jw_fragrance (TikTok) — no obligations
@theperfumemenagerie (TikTok, instagram) — no obligations
Animal Products & Testing
When an animal product is used as a perfume ingredient in one of our scents, it will be listed in the ingredients list. "Vegan" and "non-vegan" are marked on every scent listing in our master scent list, and almost all non-vegan scents have a vegan scent option available.
Currently, the only two animal-derived ingredients that are used in our scents are beeswax (beeswax absolute) and butter (butter CO2).
We do not feel comfortable using the "cruelty-free" label because some ingredient manufacturers still test on animals, so the industry's supply chain is not fully cruelty free. However, OSMOFOLIA fragrances are tested on humans rather than animals!
Open Communication
When a pricing change occurs or a product must be reformulated or discontinued, we'll publish that information on our website, as well as send an email to the subscriber list and post about it on social media. We want to make sure there are plenty of paths for open communication!
Otherwise, do you have a question about our processes, policies, or values? Want to know what we're up to or why we do things the way we do? We'd love to talk about it! Please use the contact form to send us a message, or send an email to info@osmofolia.com.
Environmental Responsibility
Reducing our environmental impact is a major focus for OSMOFOLIA. While the brand isn't perfect, we have tons of goals for the future. Take a look at the ways we're working toward environmental responsibility so far:
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Ingredient Sourcing
We try to source the natural ingredients in our fragrances as sustainably and as ethically as we can. We only use ethically and sustainably sourced natural materials, and we don't use any musks that would require the killing of an animal (such as natural deer musk). Instead, we use a house accord or a perfumer's base to recreate these scents. While the ethics of farm-grown vs. wild-harvested extracts is a discussion too nuanced to fit here, we source our materials carefully so as to contribute less to habitat loss and species overharvesting.
If you'd like to know more about where a particular ingredient came from, please reach out and ask!
Low Plastic Policy
While we can't eliminate plastic entirely from our supply chain, we can certainly make the effort to use as little plastic as possible:
✦ We use glass pipettes in the lab instead of plastic ones whenever possible.
✦ The plastic caps and rollerballs that come with our bottles are all made of polypropylene (PP) plastic, which can be recycled in category #5 in the US.
✦ Our labels and business cards are made of uncoated paper, and our packaging for transit does not use any form of plastic (see Earth-Friendly Packaging below).
✦ We try to buy from suppliers that also try to lower their plastic use when possible (like Eden Botanicals, Specialty Bottle, EarthHero, and Grounded Packaging, to name a few).
If you have ideas on how we could further reduce plastic waste, please send us a message! We'd love to hear it :)
Earth-Friendly Packaging
We're trying to make our packaging as earth-friendly as possible. We still have tons of goals for the future, but as of right now:
✦ The glass bottles and aluminum tins that our perfume comes in can both be cleaned and recycled. [Remove the labels and separate the caps/rollerballs, and these can also be recycled!]
✦ The caps and rollerballs are made of polypropylene (PP) plastic, and can be recycled at any recycling facility that takes category #5.
✦ Our padded envelopes contain honeycomb wrap and glassine paper bags rather than bubblewrap, so they are compostable, biodegradable, and recyclable.
✦ The shipping labels and product labels we use are made from uncoated 100% post-consumer waste (recycled paper, basically) and use a compostable/recyclable adhesive.
Perfumery & People
Historically, perfumery has never been an open access discipline, but that's starting to change. We believe that our sense of smell should be appreciated and celebrated, that scent education should be open access, and that perfumery should be a communal craft rather than an individual one. Here's how we're trying to achieve that:
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Perfumery Education & Access to Information
Learning perfumery is always going to be difficult and expensive, but keeping industry secrets only makes it harder.
Not only do we publish our supplier list (see Sourcing & Suppliers above), but we also publish formulas and accords on our blog/social media to help aspiring scent-makers learn.
Moreover, we'd like to share a list of the resources that the perfumer has used (currently or in the past) on their path to learning perfumery:
Classes & Databases at The Institute for Art and Olfaction
(more to come)
Open Conversation
Is there something you want to know about perfumery, scent design, or fragrance chemistry? Send us a message! We're happy to help if we have the answer. Perfumery should be an open conversation, not a secret. :)