About SkinSafe Checker
SkinSafe Checker was created to make skincare ingredient safety easier to understand.
Modern beauty and personal care products contain dozens of ingredients, many of which are difficult for consumers to recognize or evaluate. Our mission is simple: help people quickly identify potentially irritating, allergenic, or unwanted ingredients in skincare, cosmetics, and personal care products.
We believe that everyone deserves transparent information about what they put on their skin.
Why SkinSafe Checker Exists
Millions of people worldwide experience reactions to cosmetic and skincare ingredients. Common triggers such as fragrances, preservatives, and certain metals can cause irritation, allergic reactions, or long-term sensitivity.
Even for experienced skincare users, reading ingredient labels can be confusing. Ingredient names are often technical, scientific, or hidden behind multiple naming systems.
SkinSafe Checker helps bridge that gap by:
- Translating complex ingredient lists into understandable information
- Highlighting ingredients that may trigger sensitivities
- Providing educational context about cosmetic chemicals
- Helping users make more informed skincare decisions
Our goal is not to replace dermatologists, but to provide transparent information that supports smarter skincare choices.
What this site checks, and what it does not
One thing, carefully: whether an ingredient appears on this site’s published list of pore-clogging ingredients, and what rating that list gives it. That list holds 285 entries.
It does not screen for allergens, fragrance sensitisers, preservatives, irritancy, pregnancy safety or anything else. It does not know your skin. It does not know the concentration of anything in the bottle you are holding, because labels do not print concentrations. And it cannot tell you what a finished formula will do, because a comedogenic rating describes a raw ingredient tested on its own.
If an ingredient is not on the list, the tool says so and stops. Nothing here generates a rating, guesses one, or asks a language model for one. An ingredient we have no rating for gets no rating, which is a duller answer than the alternative and the only honest one.
How a rating gets onto this site
The comedogenic scale came out of dermatology research, not out of marketing. Kligman and Mills described acne caused by cosmetics in 1972. Kligman and Kwong published an improved rabbit-ear method for testing individual substances in 1979, Mills and Kligman a human back-skin model in 1982, and Fulton and colleagues used the rabbit-ear method to publish ratings for the products, cosmetics and raw ingredients then in common use in 1984.
Where this list came from
This list of 285 ratings was already on the site when the current work began. It was published here on 24 February 2026 as a single table, introduced as a list "we have compiled", and it cited no sources. We have no record of who assembled it or from which source. Some of its ratings can be traced to the published rabbit-ear studies, and the missing provenance is one of the reasons we have been checking it ingredient by ingredient. We have not changed any rating.
We did not run any of those tests. 103 of the 285 entries are given as a range rather than one number, as the table had them, and the table does not say how a range was set. What tracing found so far, entry by entry, is on where the list and the research disagree.
There is no dermatologist on staff, no review board and no named medical reviewer. Saying otherwise would be easy and would be a lie, so the site is written by the site and says so. The method in more detail.
Important Medical Disclaimer
SkinSafe Checker provides educational information only.
Our tool does not provide medical diagnoses, treatment recommendations, or dermatological advice.
If you experience persistent skin irritation, allergic reactions, or medical concerns, you should consult a qualified dermatologist or healthcare professional.
Every person’s skin is different, and ingredient reactions can vary significantly between individuals.
Transparency & Trust
Trust and transparency are core principles of SkinSafe Checker.
We are committed to:
- Providing unbiased ingredient analysis
- Clearly explaining how our results are generated
- Using research-based information sources
- Avoiding misleading health claims
Our goal is to empower consumers with clear, research-backed skincare information.
Everything this site cites
- Kligman AM, Mills OH Jr. “Acne cosmetica.” Archives of Dermatology, December 1972;106(6):843–850. (opens in a new tab) The paper that named cosmetic acne and started the search for which ingredients cause it.
- Kligman AM, Kwong T. “An improved rabbit ear model for assessing comedogenic substances.” British Journal of Dermatology, June 1979;100(6):699–702. (opens in a new tab) The rabbit-ear assay behind published 0 to 5 comedogenicity grades.
- Mills OH Jr, Kligman AM. “A human model for assessing comedogenic substances.” Archives of Dermatology, November 1982;118(11):903–905. (opens in a new tab) The human back-skin model, developed because the rabbit ear was known to overstate the risk.
- Fulton JE Jr, Pay SR, Fulton JE 3rd. “Comedogenicity of current therapeutic products, cosmetics, and ingredients in the rabbit ear.” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, January 1984;10(1):96–105. (opens in a new tab) Rabbit-ear ratings of ingredients one by one. It is behind a paywall and we have not read it, so no rating on this site is attributed to it.
- Draelos ZD, DiNardo JC. “A re-evaluation of the comedogenicity concept.” Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, March 2006;54(3):507–512. doi:10.1016/j.jaad.2005.11.1058 (opens in a new tab) Found that animal-model results did not reliably predict what happened on human skin, and that a rating for a single ingredient does not tell you how a finished product will behave.
- U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Cosmetics Labeling Claims”. (opens in a new tab) States that the FDA does not keep a list of approved or accepted cosmetic claims; a label must simply be truthful and not misleading. There is no FDA definition of “non-comedogenic” for a brand to meet.