3-free, 7-free, 10-free — nobody in the United States audits those claims before they reach the bottle. Testing has found toluene in products labelled toluene-free. Here is what to ask suppliers instead.
"3-free." "7-free." "10-free." The numbers on the front of a polish bottle have become a shorthand for safety, and clients have learned to read them. Salons have responded by stocking accordingly and, increasingly, by advertising it on the window.
There is a problem with building your positioning on that number: in the United States, nobody is checking it.
The "free-from" convention started with the toxic trio — toluene, formaldehyde and dibutyl phthalate — the three ingredients OSHA highlights in its own nail salon guidance. A polish that excludes all three calls itself 3-free.
From there the ladder is industry convention rather than regulation:
The word doing the work in each of those lines is typically. There is no federal standard defining what 7-free must exclude, no registry of approved formulations, and no agency that audits the claim before it goes on a label. A brand decides what its number means, prints it, and ships.
This would be a theoretical concern if the labels were generally accurate. Testing suggests they are not.
Published research on nail product safety reports that a substantial share of products carrying a "toluene-free" claim were found to contain toluene on analysis — in some samples at concentrations far above trace levels — and that a smaller but meaningful share of "DBP-free" products contained dibutyl phthalate.
Sit with what that means operationally. A salon can buy exclusively from brands advertising a high free-from number, market itself on that basis in good faith, and still have the ingredients it promised to avoid sitting open on every table for eight hours a day. The technician breathing it has no way to know. Neither does the owner who bought it.
The fix is not to distrust every brand. It is to stop treating a marketing number as evidence and to ask for the thing that actually is evidence.
Ask for the full INCI list, not the free-from claim. INCI is the standardised ingredient naming system. A brand that will send you a complete ingredient list for every SKU is telling you something. A brand that answers a request for the INCI list by repeating its free-from number is telling you something too.
Ask for a Certificate of Analysis. A CoA is batch-level laboratory testing. It reports what was actually measured in the product, not what the formulation was intended to contain. Reputable suppliers to the professional channel can produce one. If a supplier has never heard of the request, that is information.
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Ask for the Safety Data Sheet, and keep it. You need SDS on file for the chemicals in your salon regardless of what the label claims. It is also the document that tells your technicians what they are handling and what to do if something goes wrong.
Watch for reformulation. A brand can change a formula without changing the front of the bottle. If a product has been in your salon for years, the CoA you were shown when you first ordered it may no longer describe what you are buying.
There is an upside here beyond risk management.
Client interest in lower-toxicity services is genuine and growing, and salons are stocking accordingly. But if every salon on the street can print the same number on the same window sign, the number stops differentiating anyone.
What does differentiate: being the salon that can answer the question. When a client asks what is in the polish and the answer is a specific ingredient list rather than a marketing number — and when the technician can explain why the salon chose that product — the conversation lands differently. It reads as expertise, because it is.
That is also the honest version of the claim. A salon that says "we use products we have verified" and can show the paperwork is on much firmer ground than one repeating a number it has no way to stand behind.
Sources: OSHA — nail salon chemical hazards · Safety of nail products and health threats — peer-reviewed review, NIH/PMC
Ingredient regulation differs between the US and other markets — a formulation compliant in one may not be in another. Verify against the rules of the market you operate in.