Octyldodecanol
Octyldodecanol is rated 2 on the comedogenic scale, which is the low risk band.
A long-chain fatty alcohol used to soothe the skin and help dissolve other active ingredients.
- Comedogenic rating
- 2 out of 5
- Band
- Low risk: Tolerated by most people, including most sensitive skin.
- Composition
- Fatty Alcohol
- Also written as
- No common variants recorded
What a 2 means in practice
One and two are the low band. Most people, including most people with sensitive skin, use ingredients rated here without congestion. Very oily or very acne-prone skin sometimes reacts to a 2 over a long run.
Two things change what this number is worth. Ingredients are listed in descending order of concentration, so octyldodecanol near the top of a label matters far more than octyldodecanol at the bottom. And the rating describes the raw ingredient on its own. A 2006 review in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology found that a rating for a single ingredient does not reliably predict how a finished formula behaves on human skin. The full story of the scale is here.
Common questions
- Is octyldodecanol comedogenic?
- Octyldodecanol is rated 2 on the comedogenic scale, which is the low risk band.
- Is octyldodecanol non comedogenic?
- Not exactly. Octyldodecanol is rated 2, which is the low risk band rather than 0. Low risk and non-comedogenic are different things, and only a 0 means the second one.
- What is octyldodecanol's comedogenic rating?
- 2 out of 5. It is classed as Fatty Alcohol.
Sources for this rating
- 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 that produced most of the 0–5 numbers still quoted today.
- 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) The published ingredient-by-ingredient ratings that most comedogenic lists, including this one, trace back to.
- 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.