The topic of skincare products with or without ‘pore-clogging ingredients’ and being able to determine how a product will play out on your skin has been a growing trend in the last few months, especially on skincare-crazy social media platforms like TikTok. Skincare ingredient checkers have been around for a long time, and are now the go-to tools that millions are turning to, in order to work out if a product will be right for their skin. The question is: how accurate are skincare ingredient breakdown websites, and are they truly able to help you make an informed decision?

The comedogenicity scale

To begin, we need to look at something called ‘comedogenicity’, which is the tendency of an ingredient or product to clog pores and therefore cause breakouts of either closed comedones (texture) and/or whiteheads. Historically, skincare ingredients are applied to rabbit ears in a lab and scored from 0-5 on their ability to clog pores, 5 being severely comedogenic. Sounds simple enough, but what are the pitfalls of this method?

• Rabbit ears are not human ears, and are found to be hypersensitive, which means lots of false positives were given for some ingredients
• Not all ingredients are scored on this scale, so there are gaps in our knowledge
• Different skins react differently to different ingredients, what makes someone break out may not cause the same reaction in another person

LabMuffin has a brilliant article that details exactly how this scale was created, but for now let’s talk about why the scale matters with regards to ingredient checker websites.

Websites such as CosDNA and INCIdecoder will show a breakdown of ingredients and their comedogenicity scores. One might assume that this would mean that the mere presence of a comedogenic ingredient would therefore make a product problematic. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for a few different reasons:

• The poison is often in the dose – some ingredients are highly comedogenic in large quantities, yet not comedogenic at all in very low quantities. Ingredient checker websites don’t account for this.
• Some ingredients are more or less comedogenic when mixed with other ingredients, so really it’s about the formula itself and how certain ingredients ‘play’ with each other.

So when *are* skincare ingredient checker websites useful?

You might be questioning what the point of these websites are at all, if they cannot give you an accurate read on how breakout-causing certain products are. The answer lies in their ability to allow you to make an informed decision and, thereafter, an educated guess. Here are a few of my own criteria when assessing a new product:

• Does it have many ingredients that score above 2 on the comedogenic scale? (Many being more than two, for example). If so, keep looking.
• Are the potentially problematic ingredients in the first few lines of the ingredients list? This means they’re in higher quantities, so I’d consider finding a new option.
• Does it contain anything I know my skin really doesn’t like, such as coconut oil? If so, it’s a hard pass from me.

If your product passes these three points, it might be a match! At the very least, you can make the assessment that it is a fairly low risk product.

Finally, there a few other uses for these websites, including:

• They quickly and easily show you whether or not your ingredient contains fragrance, which for many people is an important factor.
• They might be able to advise you on ingredients that are particularly unkind to rosacea skin types.
• They can tell you what each ingredient does in a formula, for example it will highlight a surfactant (cleansing agent).