3 Safety Steps To Follow

1. Product Safety Regulations

General Product Safety Regulations 2005 required you to ensure all products are safe for consumer use.

The General Product Safety Regulations 2005 are important legislation that ensures you, as the manufacturer and/or importer, know the safety obligations your products are to meet.

Section 5 of the.Gov website shows the obligations you must follow as the manufacturer.

These obligations are a comprehensive guide to ensuring the safety of products you sell on the UK market. It’s important to save these rules and implement them within your business.

2. Risk Assessments

Perform risk assessments to identify and mitigate potential hazards.

Risk assessments are a useful tool that can help you identify any potential risks, allow you to find solutions for them, and limit the risks that may occur.

A risk assessment is a piece of paperwork with a table highlighting potential risks, the measures you will take in the event of the risk, and who is responsible for that risk. A simple risk assessment template could look like this:

Often, a risk assessment is mandatory when you hold a stall for your wax melt business at a craft fair or market. You can also use them when thinking about introducing new products and even when hiring staff.

If you were filling out the risk assessment for attending an event where you take your gazebo, you could fill the following out on your form:

• Potential Hazard: Gazebo structure overturns due to wind
• Who is at risk?: General public, other stall holders, staff
• Existing control measures: None
• Risk rating: High
• Preventative measures: Have bought water weights for each leg of the gazebo. These will be filled with water when we arrive at the event and attached securely to each leg to limit the chances of the gazebo overturning.
• Responsibilities: Myself as the business owner and stall runner

Ensuring your current risk assessment is important and should be created each time you attend an event. You need to think about the hazards at each event individually, considering the location, the weather conditions and the people involved.

3. Safety Data Sheets (SDS)

Maintain SDS for all raw materials used, detailing properties and safe handling.

A Safety Data Sheet or SDS is a document that will be available from your fragrance oil supplier, and it contains the details of each fragrance oil. Each document is unique and contains many important sections, including the hazards and chemicals that may cause allergic reactions and safety measures to take in the event of an emergency.

There will likely be many different documents available from your supplier,, so it’s important to read, understand, and store them for future use. The documents may be listed on the suppliers’ website, ready for you to download like this:

Great, but what are each of these documents? I’ve outlined them below:

• 100% SDS = Is the document you need to read and understand when handling the neat fragrance oil.
• 10% SDS = Is the document you will need to read and understand for your finished products that contain a maximum of 10% fragrance. For instance, your wax melts contain 8% fragrance oil so you will use this document to complete your CLP labels.
• 10% CLP Help Sheet = Is a document that identifies the elements you are required to place on your wax melt labels.
• IFRA = Is the document that you need to refer to when deciding what products to launch in each fragrance. It contains the safe percentages for each product you could make.
• Allergen Declaration = This is the document that lists each potential allergen and the percentage in which it is present in the chemical makeup of the fragrance oil. This is an important document when making cosmetic products.

Here is an example of a 100% SDS from Craft HQ: Baby Powder

Storing your SDS is a legal requirement, but did you know you must hold on to these documents for 10 years after a product has been discontinued?

This information is not often found online or shared on the internet, but it is a very important part of regulations and ensuring your business is compliant.

The storage of these documents is needed for a long time because consumers may have built up a collection of products and only get around to using your wax melt after it has been discontinued. You will still need to have access to the documents.

I recommend using a Google Drive account, where you can easily store and access your documents for each fragrance you use. You can refer to these as and when needed and from anywhere if you have a smartphone.

It is important to ensure you always have easy access to the documents because emergency services could, in the worst-case scenario, require them.

TOP TIP: Download all documents from your fragrance oil supplier and store your SDS documents in your Google Drive, but ensure you save all documents that refer to that fragrance oil that are accessible. This will save you from returning to your supplier to re-access something in the future.