"RIP Lyral" — a third of these 954 published formulas cannot be made today

Stated up front: this is not regulatory advice. What follows describes EU cosmetics regulation; IFRA standards are a separate system and national rules differ. If you are making something to sell, read the current texts and the IFRA standards, not this article.

Someone on r/DIYfragrance asked about a base shown at a trade fair this year:

"I'm trying to make the ultimate clean, luxe and abstract fragrance. I'm planning to use mainly white musks."

"I wanted to start a discussion about Orionide™ Oliffac™, one of the captive/specialty bases from IFF that was recently showcased at SIMPPAR2026… I'm really intrigued by its performance, especially combining it with more clean, radiant musks like Helvetolide and Habanolide and woody anchors like Iso E Super."

One reply pushed back specifically:

"As for clean musk profile, your best bet is hydroxycitronellal and other muguet mats, cyclosia, l-laurinal, biocyclamol, biomuguet and some more combined with some citronellol variety mats. Then you can spice them with your clean musks."

"Without any muguet mats, I don't think you can achieve that cleanliness with only musks and IES & Hedione HC." (Superb_Walk4874)

And at the end of the thread, three words:

"RIP Lyral!" (logocracycopy)

That is the most informative line in the thread, and it can be counted.

The short version

• Of 954 published formulas, 331 (34.7%) contain at least one material now banned or severely restricted in EU cosmetics.
• Of those 331, 257 contain one, 71 contain two, and 3 contain three or more.
• And these are not trace decorations. Within those 331, the affected materials sum to a median 5.82% of the weight, interquartile 3.00% to 9.09%, with one formula at 42.9%.
• The muguet family took the hardest hit: Lilial appears in 155 formulas (16.2%), Lyral in 50 (5.2%).
• So the two replies are making the same point. The person saying clean is built from muguet materials is right, and "RIP Lyral" says that palette lost two of its mainstays.
• And the bans rest on measurement: a 2017 five-centre study found 1.5% of 2,118 dermatitis patients reacted to HICC (rising to 1.9% with duplicate patches). A 2022 study of 3,539 patients found a decreasing trend in HICC contact allergy after the EU regulation came into force, and none for oakmoss.

Those three words can be counted

I classified corpus materials against their current status in EU cosmetics. First, how I classified:

Material	My class	Basis
Lilial (BMHCA, butylphenyl methylpropional)	Banned	Banned in EU cosmetics from March 2022, on its CMR classification under CLP
Lyral (HICC)	Banned	Regulation (EU) 2017/1410, sell-through to 2021
Musk xylene	Severely restricted / effectively withdrawn	EU limits; out of practical use
Musk ketone	Restricted	IFRA limits
Oakmoss, treemoss	Restricted	2017/1410 set limits on atranol and chloroatranol
Hydroxycitronellal	Restricted (not banned)	IFRA limits

I counted the first six as "banned or severely restricted", and kept hydroxycitronellal separate because it can still be used.

The corpus results:

Material	Formulas	Share of corpus	Median dose	Maximum
Hydroxycitronellal (restricted, not banned)	165	17.3%	8.33%	55.1%
Lilial / BMHCA	155	16.2%	6.00%	33.8%
Musk ketone	84	8.8%	4.00%	32.3%
Oakmoss	72	7.5%	2.19%	18.0%
Lyral / HICC	50	5.2%	4.57%	28.2%
Treemoss	32	3.4%	3.38%	10.0%
Musk xylene	15	1.6%	3.00%	6.0%

Total: 331 formulas (34.7%) contain at least one.

And within those 331, these materials together account for a median 5.82% of the formula's weight.

That number is the point. If their median dose were 0.1% you could delete them and pretend nothing happened. At 5.82% you cannot — that is structure, not garnish. Lilial, top of the list, sits at a median 6.00%; Lyral at 4.57%; hydroxycitronellal at 8.33%.

What this means for learning from published formulas

The corpus is a historical document.

Most of these 954 formulas come from before the bans. They are not wrong; they belong to a different rule set. And if you build one of them, there is a one-in-three chance you make something that could not be placed on the EU market.

For purely personal use the practical impact is much smaller — regulation governs placing on the market, not what you make at home — but two implications hold:

1. What you can buy has already changed. The database still lists 40 suppliers for Lyral and 37 for the Lilial record, and you will not see either at an ordinary EU retailer. Records update more slowly than markets.
2. The formula will read with a hole in it. If a formula holds 6% Lilial and you cannot buy it, you are not missing one material; you are missing six percentage points of the formula's frame, with nobody to tell you what replaces it.

The two replies are the same point

Back to the thread.

Superb_Walk4874 says you cannot get that cleanliness without muguet materials, and lists his muguet set: hydroxycitronellal, cyclosia, l-laurinal, biocyclamol, biomuguet.

Notice the shape of that list: one generic chemical name and four trade names.

And logocracycopy's "RIP Lyral" points at what that list used to look like. Lyral's odour field reads floral, muguet, cyclamen, rhubarb, woody; Lilial's reads floral, muguet, watery, green, powdery. Both banned materials were muguet materials.

So the thread's two halves are two faces of the same problem:

• Why does building clean now take a stack of trade-name substitutes? Because two mainstays were removed.
• Why isn't "just musks" enough? Because in published formulas, clean was never built by musks alone. It was muguet plus musk, and the muguet half shrank.

The corpus supports that reading. Lilial appears in 155 formulas, a frequency in the same league as coumarin (225) and vanillin (137). It was not an obscure material; it was a mainstay.

The bans were measured

This section is worth writing because "X got banned" is often discussed on forums as an arbitrary bureaucratic decision. It was not.

In 2017, Engfeldt and colleagues ran a five-centre study for the Swedish Contact Dermatitis Research Group. 2,118 dermatitis patients at five Swedish dermatology departments were consecutively patch tested with fragrance mix II at two strengths (14% and 16.5% pet.) and with duplicate preparations of HICC 5% pet.

Test	Positive
Fragrance mix II (14%)	3.2%
HICC	1.5%
Overall HICC prevalence with duplicate applications	1.9%
HICC alone detected additionally (without concomitant mix reactivity)	0.3%

The paper's actual research question was methodological: does raising HICC in the mix from 2.5% to 5% detect more positives? The answer was no — the stronger version gave rise to no more irritant reactions or signs of active sensitization, and separate HICC testing did not detect a sufficient proportion of patients reacting only to it.

But that 1.5% to 1.9% is the background against which this material was removed from the Swedish baseline series in 2014 and later banned in the EU.

In 2022, Sukakul and colleagues published an update from southern Sweden: 3,539 dermatitis patients patch tested with the baseline series and fragrance mix ingredients between 2016 and 2020.

• Fragrance contact allergy prevalence was 13%
• About 10% of those would be missed without testing individual ingredients
• And the sentence that matters here: "Unlike hydroxyisohexyl 3-cyclohexene carboxaldehyde, there was no decreasing trend of CA to Evernia prunastri (oakmoss) extract after the EU regulation came into force."

That sentence says two things at once: HICC contact allergy did decrease after the regulation, and oakmoss did not.

One banned, one restricted; two treatments producing different results inside the same dataset. Not a general claim that bans work, but a specific contrast.

The limits: both studies are of Swedish dermatitis outpatients, not the general population. 13%, 1.5% and 1.9% are rates inside that group and cannot be read as general allergy rates. One of Sukakul's authors declares in the conflict of interest statement that he is a member of the Expert Panel for Fragrance Safety, which advises the fragrance industry. That does not invalidate the results, but it is worth knowing.

I cannot answer the Orionide question

Back to what was actually asked: is that new base any good?

I cannot say. Orionide Oliffac is an IFF captive base shown at SIMPPAR only in 2026. It is not in this site's database (I searched by name and by several spellings), it has no public CAS (compounded bases do not), and I could find no independent data on it at all.

That fact can itself be recorded: a freshly released captive base appears in no public database, and a forum is the only place to ask about it. The poster asked in the right place.

And the experienced replier's response is typical too: he did not comment on the new thing at all, and instead redirected to how to build the effect. When the data does not exist yet, experience is the only source. What this series normally does — take a claim to the data — cannot be done for this question. I would rather write that down than pretend to have something to say.

What you can actually do

• Before building a published formula, scan it for Lilial, Lyral and musk xylene. One in three will hit.
• If it hits, do not simply delete. Median doses run 4% to 6%; deleting drops part of the structure.
• In published formulas, "clean" is muguet plus musk, not musk alone. On that point the corpus agrees with the experienced replier.
• Database supplier counts lag the market. Forty listed for Lyral does not mean you can buy it.
• If you are selling, read the current texts. This article counted a corpus; it is not regulatory advice.

What this doesn't establish

• The regulatory classifications are my reading of public information, not a legal opinion. EU cosmetics regulation, IFRA standards and national rules are three different systems, and all of them change. The classification here exists to make a calculation, not a compliance judgement.
• The 34.7% figure depends on my list. I counted Lilial, Lyral, musk xylene, musk ketone, oakmoss and treemoss. Add or remove entries and the number moves. I deliberately excluded hydroxycitronellal (restricted rather than banned); including it would push the share noticeably higher.
• Material matching was done with name regexes. Trade-name variants can be missed, which this series has already established as a systematic problem.
• I have no reliable dates for the corpus. "Mostly from before the bans" is inferred from composition (Lilial in 155 formulas), not from a date field, because the corpus has no dependable dates.
• Both papers studied Swedish dermatitis outpatients. 13%, 1.5% and 1.9% are rates within that group, not general population allergy rates.
• Sukakul 2022's "HICC decreased, oakmoss did not" is that study's observation in its own data. I cite it as a contrast, not as proof of causation.
• I found no independent data on Orionide, so I have not commented on it at all.