Privacy
Reading this site leaves a line in a server log, and Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity count the visit. There is no account to make, and what you paste into the checker stays in your browser.
What is written down when you visit
Every web server keeps a request log, and ours is no exception. It records the address your request came from, the page you asked for, the time, and the name your browser gives for itself. Our host keeps those logs, and so does Cloudflare, which sits in front of the site and serves most of the pages. Both are ordinary infrastructure records rather than anything we compiled about you, and we do not read them to build a picture of a reader.
Cloudflare's cookie
Cloudflare sets a cookie called cf_clearance on this domain. It is how their
bot check remembers that your browser already passed, so you are not challenged on every
page. It is marked HttpOnly, so no script on this site can read it, including ours. We did
not set it, we cannot read it, and it is not used to recognise you across other websites.
We set no cookie of our own. The cookies Google Analytics and Clarity set are described below.
Page counts from Cloudflare Web Analytics
This site uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count how many people read each page. Cloudflare
adds its script to every page as it serves it, loaded from
static.cloudflareinsights.com. It is not in the files we publish; it is added at
their end, after the page leaves ours.
It counts page views without cookies. It stores nothing in your browser and does not identify you or follow you to other sites. What it sends back to Cloudflare is the page you opened, the site that linked you here, how long the page took to load, and your country, browser and type of device. We see those only as totals.
Counting visits: Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity
Pages here load Google Tag Manager from www.googletagmanager.com, which loads
Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity. We use them to see which pages people read, which
tools they use and where a page loses them, so we can make the site easier to use.
Google Analytics records the pages you visit, how you arrived, your rough location from your
IP address, your device and browser, and the actions this site reports to it: that a check
ran (which checker, the highest rating band it found, and whether the list was pasted or
came from a shared link), whether a lookup or the A to Z filter found a match, part of one
or nothing, a click on a link to another site, a page that was not found, and how far down
a page you scrolled. It never receives the list you paste or the words you type into a
search box. Its data goes to google-analytics.com,
analytics.google.com and www.google.com.
Microsoft Clarity records how pages are used: clicks, taps, scrolling and mouse movement,
which it can play back as a recording of the page. The checkers, the lookup boxes and the A
to Z filter are hidden from it, so a recording shows an empty box where
you typed or pasted, and the checker's results are hidden too. It loads from and sends to
Microsoft's clarity.ms, and syncs its cookie through c.bing.com.
Both set cookies to tell one visit from the next. Google Analytics sets _ga
and _ga_BLCEC6GKCR; Google sets them for two years, and current browsers cut
that to about 13 months. Clarity sets _clck for a year and _clsk
for a day, and keeps _cltk in your browser until you close the tab. Microsoft
sets MUID, CLID, MR, SM,
SRM_B and ANONCHK on its own domains, clarity.ms and
bing.com. What Google and Microsoft keep, and for how long, is decided by them
and set out in their own privacy statements.
This site keeps two notes of its own in your browser, neither of them a cookie: your cookie choice, for a year once you make one, and your country as Cloudflare saw it, until you close the tab, so the banner knows whether to ask.
If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, none of this loads unless you press Accept on the banner. Everywhere else it loads by default. Wherever you are, you can change your choice here, and Reject stops it loading on every page after that.
What is not collected
There is no pixel, no advertising, no newsletter and no sign-in. Google's advertising features are off, so nothing here is used to show you ads. Apart from Cloudflare, Google and Microsoft as described above, no page on this site asks your browser to fetch anything from another company: the fonts, the images and the checker are all served from here.
No page has a form or a chat box, so this site never receives a message, a name, an email address or a phone number. The question box that ran from October 2026 was removed on 1 November 2026, and nothing sent through it is published.
The ingredient checker runs on your own machine
When you paste a product's ingredient list into the checker, the text stays in your browser. The first time you use the checker, your browser downloads the whole ingredient table from this site as one file, the same file for everyone. The matching happens in your browser, and the results appear without the list being sent anywhere. We never see what you paste, because it never arrives.
That is something you can check rather than take our word for. Open your browser's network panel, paste a list, and watch: the only request to this site is for that table file, and nothing in it carries your list. Where Google Analytics is on, one request goes to it saying a check ran, with the three facts listed above and no ingredient name. The link to a result keeps the list after the # and is only built into the box you copy it from, never into the page address, because Clarity records the address. How the checker works describes the same thing from the other end.
Links out
Some pages link to the studies we checked a rating against, and to government and medical bodies. Go to one and you are on their site under their rules, which usually differ from these.
Children
This is a reference site about cosmetic ingredients. It is not aimed at children and nothing here asks anyone their age.
Correction, 25 September 2026
For a few hours on 25 September 2026 this page said that nothing here sets a cookie and that
the site runs no analytics. Both were wrong: Cloudflare sets cf_clearance and
adds the page counter described above. The page was corrected the same day.
If this changes
Adding or removing anything that collects information means changing this page in the same edit, as happened when Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity were switched on on 15 October 2026 and when the question box was removed on 1 November 2026.