How to read an ingredient list

A cosmetic ingredient list is regulated. It uses INCI names, which are the same in every country, and it is ordered by concentration from highest to lowest, down to the one percent mark. That single rule is what makes the list readable.

Rule 1: the order tells you the concentration

If an ingredient is among the first three, there is a meaningful amount of it. If it is near the end, there is probably less than one percent. Marketing often highlights an ingredient that sits at the tail of the list.

Below one percent the order stops meaning anything, and the manufacturer may list the rest in any order. A practical rule of thumb: preservatives such as phenoxyethanol usually sit around the one percent mark, so everything after them is present in small amounts.

Rule 2: fragrance is not always spelled Parfum

Fragrance can be declared as Parfum or Fragrance, but essential oils are fragrance too. Citrus, lavender, and tea tree oils bring the same kinds of fragrance compounds as added perfume, and a product can still be marketed without the word fragrance.

The EU also requires 26 fragrance allergens to be declared by name when they are above a set threshold. Linalool, limonene, and citronellol are the most common. SkinIndex puts all of these in one fragrance group.

Rule 3: not all alcohols are alike

Alcohol Denat. and ethanol are volatile solvents, and they are the alcohols we flag as drying. Cetyl Alcohol and Cetearyl Alcohol are fatty alcohols, used in a formula as emollients and thickeners. They share a word and have opposite jobs, and mixing them up is the most common misreading of an ingredient list.

On this site we flag only the first group. Fatty alcohols are explicitly left out of the flag.