Privacy

Reading this site leaves a line in a server log, and that is the whole of it. There is no account to make, no form to fill in and nothing that follows you between pages.

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.

The one cookie, which is Cloudflare's

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, and nothing about you is stored in your browser between visits.

An analytics script that is blocked before it loads

Cloudflare adds a Web Analytics script tag to every page as it serves it, pointing at static.cloudflareinsights.com. It is not in anything we wrote and it is not in the files we publish; it is added at their end, after the page leaves ours.

It does not run. This site tells your browser to load scripts from this domain and nowhere else, so the browser refuses that one. Measured on the live site rather than assumed: the script transfers zero bytes and no measurement is ever sent. The tag is in the page, the request is refused, and nothing is reported about your visit.

What is not collected

We run no analytics of our own. No Google Analytics, no tag manager, no pixel, no heatmap. There is no newsletter, no sign-in, and no advertising. Apart from the blocked Cloudflare tag 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.

There is also no way to send us anything. The contact form and the feedback panel were removed in September 2026, along with the code behind them, so no message, name or email address reaches this site at all. No phone number is published either.

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 whole ingredient table is delivered with the page, the matching happens there, and the results appear without anything being sent back to us. 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: no request goes out. How the checker works describes the same thing from the other end.

Links out

Some pages link to the studies a rating came from, 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, because nothing here asks anyone anything.

Correction, 25 September 2026

This page first said that nothing here sets a cookie and that the site runs no analytics. Both were wrong, and they were published for several hours before anyone looked the right way. Cloudflare sets cf_clearance and adds the analytics tag described above, and neither shows up in the site's own files.

The mistake is worth naming because of how it passed: it was checked three times, against the site's source, against its published files, and by reading the cookies a page can see, and all three agreed. An HttpOnly cookie is invisible to a page, a copy of the site running on this machine has no Cloudflare in front of it, and a tag added at the edge appears in no file. Three ways of looking, one blind spot. It took a real browser against the real site, reading the cookie jar underneath the page, to see either.

If this changes

Adding anything that collects information would mean changing this page in the same edit. Until then it says what the site does, and the site does very little.